[Footnote 148: It is one of the ironies of Goethe's literary career that, in his later years, in the period of his reaction against the formlessness that had invaded German literature, he, with the approval of Schiller, translated Voltaire's Mahomet, and staged it in Weimar.]

[Footnote 149: It is this conception, as he himself tells us, that Renan applied to the life and teaching of Jesus.]

As sung by Ali and Fatima on the death of Mahomet, the ode was an allegory of his life from its beginning to its triumphant close when he passed from the present with the consciousness that he had won to his faith the nation from which he had sprung. But it also undoubtedly expressed the aspiration of the poet himself. The ambition to impress himself on the world, and the consciousness of powers to give effect to his ambition, were indeed the ruling impulses behind all his distracted activities. But he was thwarted in his ambition alike by external circumstances and by his own temperament, and there came occasions when he was disposed to accept failure as his wisest choice. In two poems of this period he gives expression to this mood, and the necessity for overcoming it. In the one, Adler und Taube, a young eagle is wounded by a fowler, but after three days recovers, though with disabled wings. Two doves alight near the spot, and one of them addresses soothing words to the crippled king of the birds. "Thou art in sorrow," he coos; "be of good courage, friend! hast thou not here all that peaceful bliss requires?... O friend, true happiness is content, and everywhere content has enough." "O wise one," spoke the eagle, and, moved to deep earnest, sinks more deeply into himself; "O wisdom! thou speakest like a dove." In the other poem, Kuenstlers Erdewallen ("The Artist's Earthly Pilgrimage"), composed in the form of a dialogue, we have equally a draft from Goethe's own experience. To provide for his family needs, the artist is forced to prostitute his genius by painting pictures for the vulgar connoisseur, and he desponds at the prospect of a life spent under such conditions, but the muse whispers consolation: "Thou hast time enough to take delight in thyself, and in every creation which thy brush lovingly depicts." It was a consolation which at this time and at other periods of his life Goethe had to take home to himself.



CHAPTER X

WERTHER, CLAVIGO

1774

In his fortieth year Goethe wrote to Wieland: "Without compulsion, there is in my case no hope."[150] So it was with him at every period of his life; without some immediate impulse out of his own experience or from the urgency of friends he was incapable of the sustained inspiration requisite to the execution of a prolonged artistic whole. We have seen how he dallied with the subject of Goetz von Berlichingen, and how it was only at the instance of his sister Cornelia that he concentrated his energies in throwing it into dramatic form. In the case of Werther we have an illustration of the same characteristic. Shortly after leaving Wetzlar, on hearing the news of Jerusalem's death, there arose in him a pressing desire to embody his late experience in some imaginative shape; and in the course of the following year he actually addressed himself to the task. But his inspiration flagged, and it was not till the beginning of 1774 that a new experience supplied a fresh impulse constraining him to complete the "prodigious little work" which was to take his contemporaries by storm.

[Footnote 150: In his sixty-second year Goethe also said of himself: "Denn gewoehnlich, was ich ausspreche, das tue ich nicht, und was ich verspreche, das halte ich nicht."]

We have it from Goethe's own hand that it was a new and "painful situation" that gave him the necessary stimulus to resume his work on Werther and to carry it to a conclusion. We have seen how on leaving Wetzlar in the autumn of 1772 he had made the acquaintance of the family von la Roche, and how he had been captivated by the elder daughter, Maximiliane. Since then he had kept up a sentimental correspondence with the mother in which we have occasional references to his continued interest in the daughter. "Your Maxe," he wrote in August, 1773, "I cannot do without so long as I live, and I shall always venture to love her." This was, of course, in the current style of the time, but a situation arose which made such amorous trifling dangerous. On January 9th, 1774, the Fraeulein von la Roche was married to Peter Brentano, a dealer in herrings, oil, and cheese, a widower with five children, with whom she settled in Frankfort. Goethe immediately became an assiduous frequenter of the Brentano household, where he was not unwelcome to the young wife, whose new surroundings were in unpleasant contrast to those of the home she had left. But Brentano was not so magnanimous as Kestner, and a fortnight had not passed before there were "painful scenes" between him and Goethe. On the 21st Goethe wrote as follows to the mother of Madame Brentano: "If you knew what passed within me before I avoided the house, you would not think, dear Mama, of luring me back to it again. I have in these frightful moments suffered for all the future; I am now at peace, and in peace let me remain."[151] He had now gone the round of all the experiences embodied in Werther; on February 1st he resumed the discontinued work, and, writing "almost in a state of somnambulism," finished it in a few weeks.

[Footnote 151: Werke, Briefe, ii. 140.]

But besides his own immediate personal experience, there went other influences to the production of Werther which affected alike its form and its contents. In his Autobiography Goethe has minutely analysed these influences, and the most potent of them he traces to the impression made by English literature on himself and his contemporaries. What impressed them as the prevailing note of that literature was a melancholy disillusion which regarded life as a sorry business at the best, and Goethe specifies Young, Gray, and Ossian as representative interpreters of this mood. In verses like these, he says, we have the precise expression of the moral disease which he has depicted in Werther:—

To griefs congenial prone, More wounds than nature gave he knew; While misery's form his fancy drew In dark ideal hues and horrors not its own![152]

[Footnote 152: These lines are by the Earl of Rochester. On reading the first English translation of Werther (1783), Goethe wrote: "It gave me much pleasure to read my thoughts in the language of my instructors."]

If English literature contributed to the tone of feeling in Werther, it also, though Goethe does not mention the fact, suggested the literary form in which it is cast. In the case of his former loves, his emotions had found vent in a succession of lyrics thrown off as occasion prompted, but his later experiences had been of a more complex nature, and demanded a larger canvas for their development. It would appear that Goethe's original intention was to adopt the dramatic form which had been so successful in the case of Goetz, and we are led to believe that, in accordance with this intention, he actually made a beginning of his work. In the interval between his discontinuing and resuming it, however, he changed his mind; and in the form in which we have it Werther is mainly composed of letters addressed by its central character to an absent friend. There can be little doubt that the epistolary form was suggested by a book with which Goethe was familiar, and which had been received with enthusiasm in Germany as in other continental countries—Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe (1747-8). Richardson's example, moreover, had been followed in another work which had achieved as sensational as success as Clarissa—Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise. In form and substance Werther was as much inspired by Richardson and Rousseau as Goetz had been by Shakespeare, yet in Werther, as in Goetz, the world recognised an original creation which bore a new message to every heart capable of receiving it.

The portentous work was published in the autumn of 1774, but the form in which we now have it belongs to a later date. In the first complete edition of Goethe's Works (1787), Werther appeared with certain modifications, which did not, however, as in the case of Goetz, organically affect its original form.[153] Expressions which to Goethe's maturer taste appeared objectionable were altered—not always, German critics are disposed to think, in the direction of improvement; the story of the unfortunate peasant in whose fate Werther saw an image of his own, was introduced; and, in deference to the feelings of Kestner and Lotte, the characters of the two persons in the book with whom readers identified them were presented in a somewhat more favourable light.[154]

[Footnote 153: In making these modifications Goethe was advised by Herder and Wieland.]

[Footnote 154: Though to the satisfaction of neither Kestner nor Lotte.]

With what degree of similitude Goethe has portrayed himself in the character of Werther must necessarily be matter of opinion, but that his work was essentially drawn from his own experience the merest outline of it conclusively shows. Equally in the case of the two parts of which the book is composed we have the presentment of successive phases of emotion through which we know that he had himself passed when he sat down to write it. The first part, the substance of which was probably drafted in the year 1773, is all but an exact transcript of Goethe's own experience from the day he settled in Wetzlar till the day he left it. Like Goethe himself, Werther settles in the spring of the year in a country town, unattractive like Wetzlar, but also, like Wetzlar, situated in a charming neighbourhood. His first few weeks there are spent as Goethe spent them—in daydreaming and vague longings; finding distraction alternately in sketching, in reading Homer, in intercourse with children and simple people, in contemplations on nature and the life of man, inspired by Spinoza and Rousseau. Then befalls the incident which also befell Goethe: he meets a girl at a ball, and he is overmastered by a passion which changes the current of his life and paralyses every other motive at its source. At the first meeting Werther learns that Charlotte is betrothed,[155] but her betrothed is absent, and, oblivious of the future, he for a few weeks lives in a state of intoxicating bliss. Albert, who, like Charlotte, has in the first part all the characteristics of his original, at length appears on the scene, and all three are gradually convinced that the situation is intolerable. There are "painful scenes," such as, according to Kestner, actually happened in Goethe's own case; and after an agonising struggle with himself Werther succeeds in breaking away from the enchanted spot, the last conversation between the three turning on the prospect of a future life—a memory, as we have seen, of an actual talk between Lotte, Kestner, and Goethe. So ends the first part, which, with unimportant variations, is a close record of the circumstances of Goethe's own sojourn in Wetzlar.

[Footnote 155: It was shortly after his meeting with Lotte Buff that Goethe learned that she was engaged to Kestner.]

A tragic end to Werther Goethe had before him from its first conception, as is proved by his eagerness to ascertain the details of Jerusalem's suicide. But to justify dramatically such an end to his hero, certain modifications in the relations of all the three characters were rendered necessary, and again his own experience suggested the mode of treatment. In the uncomfortable relations that had arisen between himself and the Brentanos, husband and wife, he found a situation which would naturally involve a catastrophe in the case of a character constituted like Werther. When in February, 1774, therefore, he sat down to complete the tale of Werther's woes, it was under a new inspiration that the characters of Albert and Charlotte fashioned themselves in his mind. Not Kestner and Lotte Buff, but the Brentanos, suggested their leading traits as well as the relations of all parties, which involved the closing tragedy. Albert becomes a jealous and somewhat morose husband, and Charlotte is depicted with the characteristics of Maxe Brentano rather than of Lotte Buff—with a more susceptible temperament and less self-control.[156]

[Footnote 156: Goethe gave the blue eyes of Maxe to Charlotte. Lotte Buff's eyes were brown.]

In the opening of the second part the character of Werther is further revealed in a new set of circumstances. Against his own inclinations he accepts an official appointment under an ambassador at a petty German Court, and his helpless unfitness in this situation for the ordinary business of life may be regarded as a commentary on Goethe's own invincible distaste for the practice of his profession. Werther finds the ambassador intolerable; and a public insult to which, as a commoner, he is subjected at a social gathering of petty nobility, drives him to resign his post. After a few months' residence with a prince, whose company in the end he finds uncongenial, he is irresistibly drawn to the scenes of his former happiness and misery. But in the interval an event happens which makes the renewal of old relations impossible. Charlotte and Albert have married, and the sight of Albert enjoying the privileges of a husband is a constant reminder of the hopelessness of his passion. Blank despair gradually takes possession of Werther's soul; in the hopeless wail of Ossian he finds the only adequate expression of his fate.[157] In the commentary which Goethe introduces to prepare readers for Werther's suicide, he suggests another motive for the act besides Werther's infatuation for Charlotte, which Napoleon as well as other critics have regarded as a mistake in art. In his state of mental and moral paralysis, we are told, Werther recalled all the misfortunes of his past life, and specially the mortification he had received during his brief official experience. But on the mind of the reader this incidental suggestion of other motives makes little impression; he feels that Werther's helpless abandonment to his passion for Charlotte is the central interest of the author himself, as it is a wholly adequate cause of the final catastrophe.

[Footnote 157: "Werther," Goethe remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson, "praised Homer while he retained his senses, and Ossian when he was going mad."]

By the fulness of its revelation of himself and by the impression it made on the public mind Werther holds a unique place among the longer productions of Goethe. His own testimony, both at the time when it was written and in his later years, is conclusive proof of the degree to which it was a "general confession," as he himself calls it. "I have lent my emotions to his (Werther's) history," he wrote shortly after the completion of his work; "and so it makes a wonderful whole."[158] In one of the best-known passages of his Autobiography he tells how he morbidly dallied with the idea of suicide, and banished the obsession only by convincing himself that he had not the courage to plunge a dagger into his breast. In a remarkable passage, written in his sixty-third year to his Berlin friend, Zelter, whose son had committed suicide, he recalls with all seriousness the hypochondriacal promptings which in his own case might have driven him to the fate of Werther. "When the taedium vitae takes possession of a man," he wrote, "he is to be pitied and not to be blamed. That all the symptoms of this wonderful, equally natural and unnatural, disease at one time also convulsed my inmost being, Werther, indeed, leaves no one in doubt. I know right well what resolves and what efforts it cost me at that time to escape the waves of death, as from many a later shipwreck I painfully rescued myself and with painful struggles recovered my health of mind." At a still later date (1824) Goethe expressed himself with equal emphasis to the same purport. "That is a creation (Werther)," he told Eckermann, "which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. There is in it so much that was deepest in my own experience, so much of my own thoughts and sensations, that, in truth, a romance extending to ten such volumes might be made out of it. Since its appearance, I have read it only once, and have refrained from doing so again. It is nothing but a succession of rockets. I am uneasy when I look at it, and dread the return of the psychological condition out of which it sprang."

[Footnote 158: Werke, Briefe, ii. 156.]

These repeated statements of Goethe, made at wide intervals of his life, sufficiently prove what a large part of himself went to the making of Werther. Yet Werther was not Goethe. From the fate of Werther he was saved by two characteristics of which we have seen frequent evidence in his previous history. It was not in his nature to be dominated for any lengthened period by a single passion to the exclusion of every other interest. No sooner had he left Wetzlar than his heart was open to the charms of Maxe Brentano, and, during the months that followed, her image and that of Lotte Buff alternately distracted his susceptibilities. Byron declared that he was capable of only one passion at a time, but Goethe was always capable of at least two. The other characteristic equally distinguishes Goethe from Werther. "I turn in upon myself," Werther writes, "and find a world—but a world of presentiments and of dim desires, not a world of definite outlines and of living force." Of a "living force" in himself Goethe was never wholly unconscious; the record of his creative efforts during the months that followed his leaving Wetzlar are sufficient evidence of the fact. The intellectual side of his nature—the impulse to know or to create—kept in check the emotional, and proved his safeguard in more crises than the Wertherian period during which, by his own testimony, he so narrowly escaped shipwreck.

The imprint of Goethe's character and genius which Werther made on the mind of his contemporaries was never effaced during his lifetime, and was even a source of embarrassment to him in his future development. For years after its appearance he found it necessary to travel incognito to avoid being pointed at as "the author of Werther"; and in the case of each of his subsequent productions the reading public had a feeling of disappointment that they were not receiving what they expected from the writer who had once so profoundly moved them. In truth, probably no book ever given to the world has made such an instantaneous, profound, and general sensation as Werther. The effect of Goetz von Berlichingen had as yet been confined to Germany; on the publication of Werther its author became a European figure in the world of letters. In Germany Werther was hawked about as a chap-book; within three years three translations appeared in France, and five years after its publication it was translated into English. The dress worn by Werther (borrowed from England), consisting of a blue coat, yellow vest, yellow hose, and top-boots, became the fashion of the day and was sported even in Paris.

Opinion in Germany had been divided on Goetz von Berlichingen, but the conflicting judgments on that work had turned only on questions of dramatic propriety. The questions raised by Werther, on the other hand, appeared to many to concern the very foundations of morality and of human responsibility. Suicide, it was indignantly clamoured, was sophistically justified in the person of Werther, and was clothed in such specious hues as to present it in the light of a natural means of escape from the troubles of life. On the ground of these supposed sinister implications the sale of Werther was prohibited in Leipzig under a penalty of ten thalers, a translation of it was forbidden in Denmark, and the Archbishop of Milan ordered it to be publicly burned in that town. There was, of course, no thought in Goethe's mind of recommending suicide by the example of Werther, but he felt the reproach keenly, and indignantly repudiated it. Yet, when a few years later, a young woman was found drowned in the Ilm at Weimar with a copy of Werther in her pocket, he was painfully reminded that the book might be of dangerous consequence to a certain class of minds.[159]

[Footnote 159: The judgment of Lessing, who had no sympathy with the effeminate sentimentality of the time, was severe. "We cannot," he said, "imagine a Greek or a Roman Werther; it was the Christian ideal that had made such a character possible." Goethe, he thought, should have added a cynical chapter (the more cynical the better) to put Werther's character in its true light. As the friend of Jerusalem, Lessing naturally resented the liberty which Goethe had taken with him.]

Werther has been described as "the act of a conqueror and a high-priest of art,"[160] and of the truth of this description we have interesting proof from Goethe's own hand. In Werther he had not only given to the world a likeness of himself; in Albert and Charlotte he had exhibited two figures who were at once identified as Kestner and Lotte, now Kestner's wife. It was not only that domestic privacy was thus invaded, but the characters assigned to Albert and Charlotte were such as could not fail to give just offence to their originals. Yet in the triumph of the artist it seems never to have occurred to Goethe that Kestner and Lotte would resent the licence he had taken with them. On the eve of the publication of Werther he sent a copy of it to Lotte, informing her at the same time that he had kissed it a thousand times before sending it, and praying her not to make it public till it was given to the world at the approaching Leipzig fair. It came as a surprise to him, therefore, when he received a letter of reproach from Kestner, protesting against the injurious presentment of himself and his wife in the book. In a first reply, Goethe frankly admitted his indiscretion, but in a second letter he took a bolder tone. "Oh! ye unbelieving ones, I would proclaim ye of little faith," he wrote. "Could you but realise the thousandth part of what Werther is to a thousand hearts, you would not reckon the cost it has been to you."[161] Lotte and Kestner, from all we know of them, were both persons of sound nature, not unduly sensitive, and, in their hearts, they may not have been displeased at their association with the brilliant youth of genius on whom the eyes of the world were now turned. At all events, neither appears to have borne him a permanent grudge for presenting them to the public in such a dubious light. Though, as has already been said, correspondence between Goethe and them gradually became more and more intermittent, mutual respect and cordiality remained, and in later years we find Goethe in the capacity of sage adviser to the prudent Kestner.[162]

[Footnote 160: By Sainte-Beuve.]

[Footnote 161: Werke, Briefe, ii. 207.]

[Footnote 162: The family of Kestner eventually published the correspondence of Goethe with their parents.—A. Kestner, Goethe und Werther, Briefe Goethes, meistens aus seiner Jugendheit, mit erlaeuternden Documenten (Stuttgart und Tuebingen, 1854).]

The subsequent influence of Werther was at once more powerful and more enduring than the influence of Goetz von Berlichingen, and Goethe himself has suggested the reason. The so-called Werther "period," he says, belongs to no special age of the world's culture, but to the life of every free spirit that chafes under obsolete traditions, obstructed happiness, cramped activity, and unfulfilled desires. "A sorry business it would be," he adds, "if once in his life every one did not pass through an epoch when Werther appeared to have been specially written for him."[163] The long series of imitations of Werther—Rene, Obermann, Childe Harold, Adolphe (to mention only the best-known)—bears out Goethe's remark that Wertherism belongs to no particular age of the world, though it may assume various forms and be expressed in different tones.[164] But in Goethe's little book the name and the thing Wertherism has received its "immortal cachet." To the intrinsic power of Werther it is the supreme tribute that Napoleon, the first European man in the world of action, as Goethe was the first in the world of thought, read it seven times in the course of his life, that he carried it with him as his companion in his Egyptian campaign, and that in his interview with Goethe he made it the principal theme of their conversation. To the literary youth of Germany, we are told, Werther no longer appeals; but such statements can be based only on conjecture, and we may be certain that in all countries there are still to be found readers to whom the record of Werther's woes seems to have been written for themselves.[165]

[Footnote 163: Eckermann, op. cit., January 2nd, 1824.]

[Footnote 164: The accidie of the Middle Ages was a form of Wertherism. Cf. Chaucer's Parson's Tale.]

[Footnote 165: It may be recalled that Werther was throughout his life one of R.L. Stevenson's favourite books. See his Letter to Mrs. Sitwell, September 6th, 1873, [Transcriber's Note: corrected error "1773"] and ch. xix. of The Wrecker.]

By a curious coincidence Goethe had hardly made a "general confession" in the writing of Werther when he was led to make another "confession" in a work of less resounding notoriety, but equally interesting as a revelation of himself. In his Autobiography he has related the origin of the piece. In the spring of 1774 there fell into his hands the recently published Memoires[166] of the French playwright Beaumarchais, which told a story that reawakened painful memories of his own past. Beaumarchais had two sisters in Madrid, one married to an architect; the other, named Marie, betrothed to Clavigo, a publicist of rising fame. On Clavigo's promotion to the post of royal archivist he throws his betrothed over, and the news of his faithlessness brings Beaumarchais to Madrid. In an interview with Clavigo he compels him, under the threat of a duel, to write and subscribe a confession of his unjustifiable treachery. To avert exposure, however, Clavigo offers to renew his engagement to Marie, and Beaumarchais accepts the condition. Clavigo again plays false, and obtains from the authorities an order expelling Beaumarchais from Madrid. Through the good offices of a retired Minister, however, Beaumarchais succeeds in communicating the whole story to the king, with the result that Clavigo is dismissed from his post.

[Footnote 166: Fragment de mon voyage d'Espagne.—Memoires de Monsieur Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, tome ii.]

We see the points in the narrative of Beaumarchais which must have touched Goethe to the quick. He also had played the false lover to Friederike Brion, who, however, had no brother like Marie to call him to account. It was characteristic of him that, on reading the Memoire, it at once struck him as affording an appropriate theme for dramatic treatment, and it was further characteristic that he needed an immediate stimulus to incite him to the task. He has told us how the stimulus came. As a diversion to relieve the monotony of Frankfort society, the youths and maidens of Goethe's circle had arranged for a time to play at married couples, and, as it happened, the same maiden fell thrice to Goethe's lot.[167] At one of the meetings of the couples he read aloud the narrative of Beaumarchais, and his partner suggested that he should turn it into a play. The suggestion, he relates, supplied the needed stimulus, and a week later the completed play was read to the reassembled circle.

[Footnote 167: Of all the women who came in her son's way, Frau Goethe thought that this lady, Anna Sibylla Muench by name, would have made him the most suitable partner in life.]

The first four Acts of the play, which Goethe entitled Clavigo, are simply the narrative of Beaumarchais cut into scenes, and they contain long passages directly translated from the original—a proceeding which Goethe justifies by the example of "our progenitor Shakespeare." In the first Scene of the first Act we are introduced to Clavigo and Carlos discussing the prospects of the former. Clavigo, who is represented as a publicist of genius, with a great career before him, is distracted by the conflict between his ambition and the sense of honour and gratitude which should bind him to his betrothed Marie, a sickly girl, by position and character unsuited to be the helpmate of an ambitious man of the world. Unstable and irresolute, he is as clay in the hands of Carlos, who plays the part of the shrewd and cynical adviser to his friend, in whose genius and brilliant future he has unbounded confidence. As the result of their talk, Clavigo decides with some compunction to abandon Marie, and, as his fortunes rise, to find a more suitable mate. In the second Scene the other characters of the play are brought before us—Marie Beaumarchais, her sister Sophie, married to Guilbert, an architect, and Don Buenco, a disappointed lover of Marie. The theme of their conversation is the ingratitude and faithlessness of Clavigo, to whom, however, Marie, dying of consumption, still clings with fond idolatry. At the close of the Scene Beaumarchais appears, breathing vengeance on Clavigo if he finds him without justification for his conduct. In the second Act, which consists of only one Scene, Beaumarchais carries out his purpose and compels Clavigo under threat of a duel to write with his own hand an abject acknowledgment of his baseness. In consistency with his fickle nature, however, Clavigo prays Beaumarchais to report to Marie his unfeigned remorse and his desire to renew their former relations. Beaumarchais agrees to convey the message, and departs under the impression that he has saved the honour of his sister. In the third Act Clavigo and Marie are reconciled, their marriage is arranged, and Beaumarchais destroys the incriminating document. The fourth Act consists of two Scenes. In the first, Carlos convinces Clavigo of his folly in compromising his career by a foolish union, and persuades him to break his pledge, undertaking at the same time to get Beaumarchais out of the way. The second Scene represents the dismay of the Guilbert household on the discovery of Clavigo's renewed treachery, Beaumarchais vowing vengeance on the double-dyed traitor, and Marie in a dying state attended by a hastily-summoned physician. In the fifth Act the play breaks with the narrative of Beaumarchais, which does not supply material for the necessary tragic conclusion, and is based on an old German ballad, with an evident recollection of the scene of Hamlet and Laertes at the grave of Ophelia. While stealing from his house under cover of night, as had been arranged with Carlos, Clavigo passes the Guilberts' door, where he sees three mourners standing with torches in their hands. On inquiry he learns that Marie Beaumarchais is dead; and presently the body is brought forth attended by Guilbert, Don Buenco, and Beaumarchais. Then ensues a passionate scene in which Beaumarchais slays Clavigo, and the Act closes with expressions of tenderness and compunction on the part of all the chief persons concerned.

In a letter to a friend[168] Goethe explained that in writing Clavigo he had blended the character and action of Beaumarchais with characters and actions drawn from his own experience; and this description strictly corresponds with the play as we have it. Though in the first four Acts, as we have seen, the incidents are directly taken from Beaumarchais and many passages in them are simply translations, the characters of the leading personages—Clavigo, Carlos, Marie, and Beaumarchais—are entirely of Goethe's own creation. Moreover, in what is original in the dialogues there are touches everywhere introduced which are not to be found in the original, and which are precisely those that are of special interest for the student of Goethe. Of the play as a work of art he was himself complacently proud. It was written, as he tells us, with the express intention of proving to the world that he could produce a piece in strict accordance with the dramatic canons which he had flouted in Goetz von Berlichingen.[169] "I challenge the most critical knife," he proudly wrote to the same correspondent, "to separate the directly translated passages from the whole without mangling it, without inflicting deadly wounds, not to say only on the narrative, but on the structure, the living organism of the piece." In Clavigo, at least, he has achieved what he failed to achieve in any other in the long series of his dramatic productions; it proved a successful acting play, and is still produced with acceptance to the present time. Yet from the beginning those who have admired Goethe's genius most have shaken their heads over Clavigo. It was to be expected that the youthful geniuses of the Sturm und Drang would be wrathful at the apostacy of their protagonist, who in Goetz von Berlichingen had set at naught all the traditional rules of the drama. But more discerning critics, then and since, have expressed their dissatisfaction on other grounds. There are in Clavigo no elements of greatness such as appear even through the immaturities of Goetz and Werther. Clavigo himself is so poor a creature as to leave the reader with no other feeling for him than contempt; Marie is characterless; and the other persons in the play have not sufficient scope to become well-defined figures. And the last Act, the only original addition to Beaumarchais' narrative, is in a style of cheap melodrama which, coming from the hand of Goethe, can be regarded only as a weak concession to the sentimentalism of the Darmstadt circle. "You must give us no more such stuff; others can do that," was Merck's mordant comment on Clavigo. Merck's opinion may have been influenced by the fact that in the cynical Carlos there are unpleasing traits of himself, but succeeding admirers of the Master have for the most part been in agreement with him.[170]

[Footnote 168: To Fritz Jacobi, August 21st, 1774.]

[Footnote 169: In language, as well as in form, Clavigo followed traditional models. Wieland was naturally gratified by Goethe's return to those models which he had set at defiance in Goetz.]

[Footnote 170: In his Autobiography Goethe expresses the opinion that Merck's advice was not sound, and that he might have done wisely in producing a succession of plays like Clavigo, some of which, like it, might have retained their place on the stage.]

But if Clavigo is not to be ranked among the greater works of Goethe, as a biographical document it is even more important than Werther. In the Weislingen of Goetz he had drawn a portrait of himself, and in Clavigo he has drawn a similar portrait at fuller length. "I have been working at a tragedy, Clavigo," he wrote to a correspondent, "a modern anecdote dramatised with all possible simplicity and sincerity; my hero, an irresolute, half-great, half-little man, the pendant to Weislingen in Goetz or rather Weislingen himself, developed into a leading character. In it," he adds, "there are scenes which I could only indicate in Goetz for fear of weakening the main interest." In Clavigo we have at once a fuller revelation of himself and of his own personal experience. He is here, in a manner, holding a dialogue with himself regarding his own character and his own past life. In the first Scene of the first Act we must recognise a vivid presentment of the state of Goethe's own feelings at the crisis when he abandoned Friederike. In such a passage as the following Carlos only expresses what must then have passed through Goethe's own mind: "And to marry! to marry just when life ought to come into its first full swing; to settle down to humdrum domestic life; to limit one's being, when one has not yet done with half of one's roving; has not completed half of one's conquests!" Out of Goethe's own heart, also, must have come these words of Clavigo: "She [Marie] has vanished, clean vanished from my heart!... That man is so fickle a being!" What was said of Werther as the counterpart of Goethe applies, of course, equally in the case of Clavigo. Goethe was not at any moment the feeble creature we have in Clavigo, yet in Clavigo's inconstancy and ambition, in his womanish susceptibility and the need of his nature for external stimulus and counsel, we have a portrayal of Goethe of which every trait holds true at all periods of his life. In the Maries of Goetz and Clavigo, both betrayed by false lovers, Goethe tells us that we may find a penitent confession of his own conduct towards Friederike. But assuredly it was not with the primary intention of making this confession that either play was written. Both plays, in truth, are evidence of what is borne out in the long series of his imaginative productions from Goetz to the Second Part of Faust: their conception, their informing spirit, their essential tissue come immediately from Goethe's own intellectual and emotional experience. Objective dramatic treatment of persons or events was incompatible with that passionate interest in the problems of nature and human life by which he was possessed at every stage of his development.



CHAPTER XI

GOETHE AND SPINOZA—DER EWIGE JUDE

1773-4

If we are to accept Goethe's own statement, during the years 1773-4—the distracted period, that is to say, which followed his experiences at Wetzlar, and of which Werther and Clavigo are the characteristic products—he came under the influence of a thinker who transformed his conceptions, equally of the conduct of life and of man's relations to the universe—the Jewish thinker, Benedict Spinoza. The passage in which he expresses his debt to Spinoza is one of the best known in all his writings, and is, moreover, a locus classicus in the histories of speculative philosophy. "After looking around me in vain for a means of disciplining my peculiar nature, I at last chanced upon the Ethica of this man. To say exactly how much I gained from that work was due to Spinoza or to my own reading of him would be impossible; enough that I found in him a sedative for my passions and that he appeared to me to open up a large and free outlook on the material and moral world. But what specially attached me to him was the boundless disinterestedness which shone forth from every sentence. That marvellous saying, 'Whoso truly loves God must not desire God to love him in return,' with all the premises on which it rests and the consequences that flow from it, permeated my whole thinking. To be disinterested in everything, and most of all in love and friendship, was my highest desire, my maxim, my constant practice; so that that bold saying of mine at a later date, 'If I love Thee, what is that to Thee?' came directly from my heart."[171]

[Footnote 171: Saying of Philine in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, bk. iv. ch. ix.]

What is surprising is that of this spiritual and intellectual transformation which Goethe avouches that he underwent there should be so little evidence either in his contemporary correspondence or in the conduct of his own life. In his letters of the period to which he refers he frequently names the authors with whom he happened to be engaged, but Spinoza he mentions only once, and certainly not in terms which confirm his later testimony. In a letter to a correspondent who had lent him a work of Spinoza we have these casual words: "May I keep it a little longer? I will only see how far I may follow the fellow (Menschen) in his subterranean borings." Whether he actually carried out his intention, or what impression the reading of the book made upon him, we are nowhere told, though, if the impression had been as profound as his Autobiography suggests, we should naturally have expected some hint of it. In his Prometheus, indeed, as we have seen, there are suggestions of Spinozistic pantheism, but these may easily have been derived from other sources, and, moreover, in the passage quoted, the pantheistic conceptions of Spinoza are not specifically emphasised. We know, also, that in preparing his thesis for the Doctorate of Laws he had consulted Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and the scathing criticism on the perversions of the teaching of Christ in that treatise may have suggested certain passages in a poem presently to be noted.[172] Yet, so far as his own contemporary testimony goes, we are led to conclude that in his retrospect he has assigned to an earlier period experiences which were of gradual growth, and which only at a later date were realised with the vividness he ascribes to them. If we turn to his actual life during the same period, it is equally hard to trace in it the results of the tranquillising influence which he ascribes to Spinoza. As we have seen him, he was in mind distracted by uncertainty regarding the special function for which nature intended him; and in his affections the victim of emotions which by their very nature could not receive their full gratification. Nor can we say that his relations to his father, to Kestner, or Brentano were characterised by that "disinterestedness" which he claims to have attained from his study of Spinoza. As we shall presently see, Goethe was so far accurate in his retrospect that at the period before us he was already attracted by the figure of Spinoza, but it was not till many years later that a close acquaintance with Spinoza's writings resulted in that indebtedness to which he gave expression when he said that, with Linnaeus and Shakespeare, the Jewish thinker was one of the great formative influences in his development.

[Footnote 172: An entry in his Ephemerides, the diary which he kept in his 21st year (see above, p. 102), shows that Spinoza's philosophy, as he conceived it, was then repugnant to him. The passage is as follows: "Testimonio enim mihi est virorum tantorum sententia, rectae rationi quam convenientissimum fuisse systema emanativum (he is thinking specially of Giordano Bruno); licet nulli subscribere velim sectae, valdeque doleam Spinozismum, teterrimis erroribus ex eodem fonte manantibus, doctrinae huic purissimae, iniquissimum fratrem natum esse."—Max Morris, op. cit. ii. 33.]

To the same period to which Goethe assigns his transformation by Spinoza he also assigns the original conception of a work in which Spinoza was, at least, to find a place. As has been said, there are passages in the fragments of this poem that were actually written which may have been suggested by the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of Spinoza, but the general tone and tendency of the fragments are equally remote from the temper and the contemplations of the Spinoza whom the world knows. The dominant note of Der Ewige Jude, as the fragments are designated, is, indeed, suggestive, not of Spinoza, but of him who may already have been in embryo in Goethe's mind—Mephistopheles. Mephistophelian is the ironical presentment in Der Ewige Jude of the follies, the delusions of man in his highest aspirations.

Near the close of his life it was said of Goethe that the world would come to believe that there had been not one but many Goethes,[173] and the contrast between the author of Werther and the author of Der Ewige Jude is an interesting commentary on the remark. Yet the subject of the abortive poem, as we have it—the perversions of Christianity in its historical development—was not a new interest for him. During his illness after his return from Leipzig he had, as we saw, assiduously read Arnold's History of Heretics,[174] with the result that he excogitated a religious system for himself. His two contributions to the short-lived Review also show that religion, doctrinal and historical, was still a living interest for him. Moreover, as was usually the case with all his creative efforts, there were external promptings to his choice of the subject which is the main theme of the fragments in question. The religious world of Germany at this period was distracted by the controversies of warring theologians. There were the rationalists, who would bring all religion, natural and revealed, to the bar of human reason; there were the dogmatists, who thought religion could never rest on a secure foundation except it were embodied in an array of definite formulas; and, lastly, there were the pietists, or mystics, for whom religion was a matter of pious feeling independent of all dogma. In the spectacle of these Christians reprobating each others' creeds Goethe saw a theme for a moral satire which, fragment as it is, takes its place with the most powerful efforts of his genius.

[Footnote 173: By Felix Mendelssohn.]

[Footnote 174: See above, p. 65.]

Yet, as originally conceived, Der Ewige Jude was apparently to have been worked out along other lines. What this original conception was, Goethe tells in some detail in his Autobiography; and, as it is there expounded, we see the scope of a poem which, if the power apparent in the existing fragments had gone to the making of it, would have taken its place with Faust among the great imaginative works of human genius. The theme of the poem was to be the Wandering Jew, with whose legend Goethe was familiar from chap-books he had read in childhood. The poem was to open with an account of the circumstances in which the curse of Cain was incurred by Ahasuerus, the name assigned in the legend to the Wandering Jew. Ahasuerus was to be represented as a shoemaker of the type of Hans Sachs—a kind of Jewish Socrates who freely plied his wit in putting searching questions to the casual passers-by. Recognised as an original, persons of all ranks and opinions, even the Sadducees and Pharisees, would stop by the way and engage in talk with him. He was to be specially interested in Jesus, with whom he was to hold frequent conversations, but whose idealism his matter-of-fact nature was incapable of understanding. When, in the teeth of his protestations, Jesus pursued his mission and was finally condemned to death, Ahasuerus would only have hard words for his folly. Judas was then to be represented as entering the workshop and explaining that his act of treachery had been intended to force Jesus to become the national deliverer and declare himself king, but Judas receives no comfort from Ahasuerus, and straightway takes his own life. Then was to follow the scene retailed in the legend—Jesus fainting at Ahasuerus's door on his way to death; Simon the Cyrenian relieving him of the burden of the Cross; the reproaches of Ahasuerus addressed to the Saviour for neglecting his counsel; the transfigured features on the handkerchief of St. Veronica; and the words of the Lord dooming his stiff-necked gainsayer to wander to and fro on earth till his second coming. As the subsequent narrative was to be developed, it was to illustrate the outstanding events in the history of Christianity—one incident in the experience of the Wanderer marked for treatment being an interview with Spinoza.

In concluding the sketch of the poem as he originally conceived it, Goethe remarks that he found he had neither the knowledge nor the concentration of purpose necessary for its adequate treatment; and in point of fact, in the fragment as it exists there is little suggestion of the original conception. The title which Goethe himself gave it at a later date, Gedicht der Ankunft des Herrn, more fitly describes it than the title Der Ewige Jude. Of the two main sections into which the poem is divided, the first, extending to over seventy lines, corresponds most closely to the original conception. In twenty introductory lines the poet describes how the inspiration to sing the wondrous experiences of the much-travelled man had come to him. The note struck in these lines is maintained throughout the remainder of the fragment. It is a note of ironic persiflage which is plainly indicated to the reader. In lack of a better Pegasus, a broomstick will serve the poet's purpose, and the reader is invited to take or leave the gibberish as he pleases. Then follows a description of the shoemaker, who is represented as half Essene, half Methodist or Moravian, but still more of a Separatist—certainly not the type originally conceived by Goethe as that of the Wandering Jew. The shoemaker is, in fact, a sectary of Goethe's own time, discontented with the religious world around him, and convinced that salvation is only to be found in his own petty sect. Equally as a picture of historical Christianity in all ages is meant the satirical presentment of the religious condition of Judaea—of indolent and luxurious church dignitaries, fanatics looking for signs and wonders, denouncing the sins of their generation, and giving themselves up to the antics of the spirit.

But it is in the last and longest segment of the poem that its real power and interest are to be found. Its theme is the second coming of Christ and his experiences in lands professing his religion. In a scene, compared with which the Prologue in Heaven of Faust is decorous, God the Father ironically suggests that the Son would find scope for his friendly feeling to the human kind if he were to pay a visit to the earth. Alighting on the mountain where Satan had tempted him, the Son, filled with tender yearning for the race for whom he had died, has already anxious forebodings of woe on earth. In a soliloquy, which we may take as the expression of Goethe's own deepest feelings, as it is the expression of his finest poetic gift, he gives utterance to his boundless love for man, and his compassion for a world where truth and error, happiness and misery, are inextricably linked. Continuing his descent, he first visits the Catholic countries where he finds that in the multitude of crosses Christ and the Cross are forgotten. Passing into a land where Protestantism is the professed religion, he sees a similar state of things. He meets by the way a country parson who has a fat wife and many children, and "does not disturb himself about God in Heaven." Next he requests to be conducted to the Oberpfarrer of the neighbourhood, in whom he might expect to find "a man of God," and the fragment ends with an account of his interview with the Oberpfarrer's cook, Hogarthian in its broad humour, but disquieting even to the reader who may hold with Jean Paul that the test of one's faith is the capacity to laugh at its object.

Goethe forbade the publication of Der Ewige Jude, and we can understand his reason for the prohibition.[175] To many persons for whose religious feelings he had a genuine respect—to his mother among others—the poem would have been a cause of offence of which Goethe was not the man to be guilty. Moreover, a continuous work in such a vein was alien to Goethe's own genius. As we have them, the fragments are but another specimen of that "godlike insolence" which, in his later years, he found in his satires on Herder, Wieland, and others.

[Footnote 175: It was first published in 1836, four years after his death.]



CHAPTER XII

GOETHE IN SOCIETY

1774

The publication of Goetz von Berlichingen in the spring of 1773, we have seen, had made Goethe known to the literary world of Germany, and a figure of prime interest to its leading representatives. Hitherto, nevertheless, with the exception of Herder, he had come into personal contact with no men of outstanding note who might hold intercourse with him on anything like equal terms. In the summer of 1774, however, when Clavigo and Werther were on the eve of publication, he was brought into contact with three men, all of whom had already achieved reputation in their respective spheres; and all of whom had visions as distinct from each other as they were distinct from Goethe's own. As it happens, we have records of their intercourse from the hands of three of the four, and, taken together, they present a picture of the youthful Goethe which leaves little to be desired in its fidelity, in its definiteness, in its vividness of colour. During the greater part of two months (from the last week in June till the middle of August) he comes before us in all the splendour of his youthful genius, with all his wild humours, his audacities, his overflowing vitality.

The first of these three notabilities who came in Goethe's way was one of whom he himself said, "that the world had never seen his like, and will not see his like again." He was Johann Kaspar Lavater, born in Zurich in 1741, and thus eight years older than Goethe. Lavater had early drawn the attention of the world to himself. In his sixteenth year he had published a volume of poems (Schweizerlieder) which attained a wide circulation, and a later work (Aussichten in die Ewigkeit) found such acceptance from its vein of mystical piety that he was hailed as a religious teacher who had given a new savour to the Christian life. At the time when he crossed Goethe's path he was engaged on the work on Physiognomy with which his name is chiefly associated, and it was partly with the object of collecting the materials for that work that he was now visiting Germany. But the personality of Lavater was more remarkable than his writings. By his combination of the saint and the man of the world he made a unique impression on all who met him, on Goethe notably among others. That his religious feelings were sincere his lifelong preoccupation with the character of Christ as the great exemplar of humanity may be taken as sufficient proof. To impress the world with the conception he had formed of the person of Christ was the mission of his life, and it was in the carrying out of this mission that his remarkable characteristics came into play. With a face and expression which suggested the Apostle John, he exhibited in society a tact and address which, at this period at least, did not compromise his religious professions. Next to his interest in the Founder of Christianity was his interest in human character, and his divination of the working of men's minds was such that, according to Goethe, it produced an uneasy feeling to be in his presence. Be it added that Lavater was in full sympathy with the leaders of the Sturm und Drang as emancipators from dead formalism, and the champions of natural feeling as opposed to cold intelligence. Such was the remarkable person with whom Goethe was thrown into contact during a few notable weeks, and who has recorded his impressions of him with the insight of a discerner of spirits. As time was to show, they were divided in their essential modes of thought and feeling by as wide a gulf as can separate man from man, and in later years Lavater's compromises with the world in the prosecution of his mission drew from Goethe more stinging comments than he has used in the case of almost any other person.[176] In the passages of his Autobiography, where he records his first intercourse with Lavater, though his tone is distinctly critical, of bitterness there is no trace, and there is the frankest testimony to Lavater's personal fascination and the stimulating interest of his mind and character.

[Footnote 176: In one of his Xenien Goethe speaks thus of Lavater:—

"Schade, dass die Natur nur einen Menschen aus dir schuf, Denn zum wuerdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff."]

Relations between the two had begun a year before their actual meeting. Lavater had read Goethe's Letter of the Pastor, and his interest in its general line of thought led him to open a correspondence with its author. The reading of Goetz, a copy of which Goethe sent to him, convinced him that a portent had appeared in the literary world. "I rejoice with trembling," he wrote to Herder; "among all writers I know no greater genius." Before they met, indeed, Lavater was already dominated by a force that brought home to him a sense of his own weakness to which he gave artless expression. In some lines he addressed to Goethe he takes the tone of a humble disciple, and prays that out of his fulness he would communicate ardour to his feelings and light to his intelligence. Yet in Lavater's eyes Goethe was a brand to be plucked from the burning, and, born proselytiser as he was, he even made the attempt to convert Goethe to his own views of ultimate salvation. In response to his appeal Goethe wrote a letter which should have convinced Lavater that he was dealing with a son of Adam with the ineradicable instincts of the natural man.[177] "Thank you, dear brother," he wrote, "for your ardour regarding your brother's eternal happiness. Believe me, the time will come when we shall understand each other. You hold converse with me as with an unbeliever—one who insists on understanding, on having proofs, who has not been schooled by experience. And the contrary of all this is my real feeling. Am I not more resigned in the matter of understanding and proving than yourself? Perhaps I am foolish in not giving you the pleasure of expressing myself in your language, and in not showing to you by laying bare my deepest experiences that I am a man and therefore cannot feel otherwise than other men, and that all the apparent contradiction between us is only strife of words which arises from the fact that I realise things under other combinations than you, and that in expressing their relativity I must call them by other names; and this has from the beginning been the source of all controversies, and will be to the end. And you will be for ever plaguing me with evidences! And to what end? Do I require evidence that I exist? evidence that I feel? I treasure, cherish, and revere only such evidences as prove to me that thousands, or even one, have felt that which strengthens and consoles me. And, therefore, the word of man is for me the word of God, whether by parsons or prostitutes it has been brought together, enrolled in the canon, or flung as fragments to the winds. And with my innermost soul I fall as a brother on the neck of Moses! Prophet! Evangelist! Apostle! Spinoza or Machiavelli! But to each I am permitted to say: 'Dear friend, it is with you as it is with me; in the particular you feel yourself grand and mighty, but the whole goes as little into your head as into mine.'"

[Footnote 177: The letter is addressed to Heinrich Pfenninger, an engraver in Zurich, who engraved some of the plates in Lavater's book on Physiognomy.—Werke, Briefe, Band ii. pp. 155-6.]

On June 23rd Lavater arrived in Frankfort, where during four days he was entertained as a guest in the Goethe household. The news of his coming had created a lively interest in all sections of the community, and during his stay he was besieged by admiring crowds, especially of women, who insisted even on seeing the bedchamber where the prophet slept. "The pious souls," was Merck's sardonic comment, "wished to see where they had laid the Lord"; but even Merck came under the prophet's spell. The meeting of Lavater and Goethe was characteristic of the time. "Bist's?" was Lavater's first exclamation. "Ich bin's," was the reply; and they fell upon each other's necks. On Lavater's indicating "by some singular exclamations" that Goethe was not exactly what he expected, Goethe replied in the tone of banter which he maintained throughout their personal intercourse, that he was as God and nature had made him, and they must be content with their work. "All spirit (Geist) and truth,"[178] is Lavater's comment on Goethe's conversation at the close of their first day's meeting.

[Footnote 178: Biedermann, op. cit. i. 33.]

The following days were taken up with excursions and social gatherings in which Lavater was the central figure, entrancing his hearers by his social graces and his apostolic unction. In the Fraeulein von Klettenberg he found a kindred soul, and Goethe listened, as he tells us, with profit as they discoursed on the high themes in which they had a common interest. If he derived profit, it was not of a nature that Lavater and the Fraeulein would have desired. With the religious opinions of neither was he in sympathy, and when they rejected his own, he says, he would badger them with paradoxes and exaggerations, and, if they became impatient, would leave them with a jest. What is noteworthy in Lavater's record, indeed, is Goethe's communicativeness and spontaneity in all that concerned himself. "So soon as we enter society," is one of his remarks recorded by Lavater, "we take the key out of our hearts and put it in our pockets. Those who allow it to remain there are blockheads."[179]

[Footnote 179: Ib. p. 34.]

During his stay in Frankfort Lavater was so constantly surrounded by his admirers that Goethe saw comparatively little of him. On June 28th Lavater left for Ems, and it is a testimony to their mutual attraction that Goethe accompanied him. The day's journey seems to have left an abiding impression on Goethe's memory, as he makes special reference to it in his record of Lavater's visit; and, as it happens, Lavater noted in his Diary the principal topics of their conversation. Travelling in a private carriage during the long summer day, they had an opportunity for abundant talk such as did not occur again. One theme on which Goethe spoke with enthusiasm, it is interesting to note, was Spinoza and his writings, but, as his talk is reported by Lavater, there was no hint in it of the profound change which the study of Spinoza had effected in him. It was to the man and not the thinker that he paid his reverential tribute—to the purity, simplicity, and high wisdom of his life. But Goethe's own literary preoccupations appear to have been the chief subject of their talk. He spoke of a play on Julius Caesar on which he was engaged, and which remained one of his many abortive ambitions; he read passages from Der Ewige Jude, "a singular thing in doggerel verse," Lavater calls it; recited a romance translated from the Scots dialect; and narrated for Lavater's benefit the whole story of the Iliad, reading passages of the poem from a Latin translation. The memorable day was not to be repeated. At Ems, as at Frankfort, Lavater was taken possession of by a throng of worshippers, and the state of his own affairs at home afforded Goethe an excuse for leaving him.

By a curious coincidence, shortly after Goethe's return, there arrived another prophet in Frankfort—also, like Lavater, out on a mission of his own. This was Johann Bernhard Basedow, whose character and career had made him one of the remarkable figures of his time in Germany. Born in Hamburg in 1723, the son of a peruke-maker there, in conduct and opinions he had been at odds with society from the beginning. In middle age he had come under the influence of Rousseau, and thenceforth he made it his mission by word and deed to realise Rousseau's ideals in education. He had expounded his theories in voluminous publications which had attracted wide attention, and the object of his present travels was to collect funds to establish a school at Dessau in which his educational views should be carried into effect.[180] Goethe, as he himself tells us, had as little sympathy with the gospel of Basedow as with that of Lavater, but, always attracted to originals, Basedow's personality amused and interested him. What gave point to his curiosity was the piquancy of the contrast between the two prophets. Lavater was all grace, purity, and refinement; "in his presence one shrank like a maiden from hurting his feelings." In appearance, voice, manner, on the other hand, Basedow was the incarnation of a hectoring bully, as regardless of others' feelings as he was impermeable in his own. His personal habits, also, were a further trial, as he drank more than was good for him and lived in an atmosphere of vile tobacco smoke. Such was the singular mortal whose society Goethe deliberately sought and cultivated during the next few weeks as opportunity offered.

[Footnote 180: The school was actually founded in 1774, but subsequently, owing to quarrels with his colleagues, Basedow had to leave it. It was closed in 1793.]

After spending some days in Frankfort, Basedow, on July 12th, set out to join Lavater at Ems, whether at Goethe's suggestion or of his own accord we are not told. Goethe had seen enough of Basedow to make him wish to see more of him, and, moreover, it would be a piquant experience to see the two incongruous apostles together. "Such a splendid opportunity, if not of enlightenment, at least of mental discipline," he says, "I could not, in short, let slip." Accordingly, leaving some pressing business in the hands of his father and friends, he followed Basedow to Ems on July 15th. Ems, then as now, was a gay watering-place crowded with guests of all conditions, and therefore an excellent field for the two proselytisers. Goethe did not spend his days in the company of the two lights; while they were plying their mission, he threw himself into the distractions of the town, as usual making himself a conspicuous figure by his overflowing spirits and his practical jokes. Only at night, when he did not happen to have a dancing partner, did he snatch a moment to pay a visit to Basedow, whom he found in a close, unventilated room, enveloped in tobacco smoke, and dictating endlessly to his secretary from his couch; for it was one of Basedow's peculiarities that he never went to bed. On one occasion Goethe had an excellent opportunity of observing the contrasted characters of the two prophets. The three had gone to Nassau to visit the Frau von Stein, mother of the statesman, and a numerous company had been brought together to meet them. All three had the opportunity of displaying their special gifts; Lavater his skill in physiognomy, Goethe the gift he had inherited from his mother of story-telling to children; but in the end Basedow asserted himself in his most characteristic style. With a power of reasoning and a passionate eloquence, to which both Goethe and Lavater bear witness, he proclaimed the conditions of the regeneration of society—the improved education of youth and the necessity for the rich to open their purses for its accomplishment. Then, his wanton spirit as usual getting the better of him, he turned the torrent of his eloquence in another direction. A thorough-going rationalist, his pet aversion was the dogma of the Trinity, and on that dogma he now directed his batteries, with the effect of horrifying his audience, most of whom had come to be edified by the pious exhortations of Lavater. Lavater mildly expostulated; Goethe endeavoured by jesting interruptions to change the subject, and the ladies to break up the company. All their efforts were in vain, and the apostle of Rousseau had the satisfaction of completely unbosoming himself and at the same time forfeiting some contributions to his educational scheme. As they drove back to Ems, Goethe took a humorous revenge. The heat of a July day and his recent vocal exertions had made the prophet thirsty, and as they passed a tavern he ordered the driver to pull up. Goethe imperiously countermanded the order, to the wrath of Basedow, which Goethe turned aside, however, with one of his ever-ready quips.

The strangely-assorted trio were not yet tired of each other's company, for, when on July 18th Lavater left Ems, both Goethe and Basedow accompanied him. Their way lay down the Lahn and the Rhine, and on the voyage Basedow and Goethe conducted themselves like German students on holiday—the former discoursing on grammar and smoking everlastingly, the latter improvising doggerel verses and the beautiful lines beginning: Hoch auf dem alten Turme steht. On landing at Coblenz the behaviour of the pair was so outrageous that all three were apparently taken by the crowd for lunatics. At Coblenz they dined, and the dinner has its place in literature, for both in his Autobiography and in some sarcastic lines (Dine zu Coblenz) Goethe has commemorated it. He sat between Lavater and Basedow, and during the meal the former expounded the Revelation of St. John to a country pastor, and the latter exerted himself to prove to a stolid dancing-master that baptism was an anachronism.

On the 20th they continued their voyage down the Rhine as far as Bonn—Goethe still in the same madcap humour. Lavater gives us a picture of him at one moment on the voyage—with gray hat, adorned with a bunch of flowers, with a brown silk necktie and gray collar, gnawing a Butterbrot like a wolf. From Bonn they drove to Cologne, Goethe on the way inscribing in an album the concluding lines of the Dine zu Coblenz:—

Und, wie nach Emmaus, weiter ging's [Transcriber's Note: corrected error "Emaus"] Mit Geist und Feuerschritten, Prophete rechts, Prophete links, Das Weltkind in der Mitten.

At Cologne they parted for the day, Lavater proceeding to Muelheim[181] and Goethe to Duesseldorf. On the 21st Goethe was at Elberfeld, where his former friend Jung Stilling was settled as a physician. Stilling has related how Goethe made him aware of his presence. A message came to him that a stranger, who had been taken ill at an inn, wished to see him. He found the stranger in bed with head covered, and when at his request he leant over to feel his pulse, the patient flung his arms round his neck. On the evening of the same day there was a social gathering at the house of a pious merchant in the town in honour of Lavater, who had come to Elberfeld and was the merchant's guest. As described by Stilling, the guests, chiefly consisting of persons of the pietist persuasion, were as remarkable for their appearance as for their opinions, and the artist who accompanied Lavater in his travels busily sketched their heads throughout the evening. Goethe was in his wildest mood, dancing round the table in a manner familiar to those who knew him, but which led the strangers present to doubt his sanity. It was apparently during the same evening that there occurred an incident which, as recorded by Lavater, shows us another side of Goethe. Among the guests was one Hasenkamp, a pietistic illuminist, who suddenly, when the company was in the full flow of amicable conversation, turned to Goethe and asked him if he were the Herr Goethe, the author of Werther. "Yes," was the answer. "Then I feel bound in my conscience to express to you my abhorrence of that infamous book. Be it God's will to amend your perverted heart!" The company did not know what to expect next, when Goethe quietly replied: "I quite understand that from your point of view you could not judge otherwise, and I honour you for your candour in thus taking me to task. Pray for me!"[182]

[Footnote 181: Basedow remained for a time at Muelheim. As we shall see, he and Goethe met again later in the month.]

[Footnote 182: As Werther was not published till the autumn of 1774, there must be some confusion in Lavater's narrative.]

Among the guests who were present at the same motley gathering was the third distinguished personage whose acquaintance Goethe made during these memorable weeks. This was Fritz Jacobi, one of the interesting figures in the history of German thought, alike by his personal character and the nature of his speculations. Goethe and he had common friends before they met, but their relations had been such as to make their meeting a matter of some delicacy. Goethe had satirised the poetry of Jacobi's brother Georg, and in his correspondence even vehemently expressed his dislike to the characters of both brothers as he had been led to conceive them. Three women—Sophie von la Roche, Johanna Fahlmer, the aunt of the Jacobis, and Betty Jacobi, their sister, all of whom Goethe counted among his friends—had endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between Goethe and the two brothers, but eventually it was Goethe's own impulsive good nature that led to their meeting. The Jacobis lived in Duesseldorf, and the morning after his arrival in the town he called at their house, but found that Fritz had gone to Pempelfort, a place in the neighbourhood where he had an estate. Goethe at once set out for Pempelfort, and in a letter to the wife of Fritz he characteristically describes the circumstances of the meeting. "It was glorious that you did not happen to be in Duesseldorf and that I did what my simple heart prompted me. Without introduction, without being marshalled in, without excuses, just dropping straight from heaven before Fritz Jacobi! And he and I, and I and he! And, before a sisterly look had done the preliminaries, we were already what we were bound to be and could be."[183]

[Footnote 183: Werke, Briefe, ii. 180.]

Fritz Jacobi possessed a combination of qualities that were expressly fitted to impress Goethe at the period when they met. Handsome in person, and with the polished manners of a man of the world, he conjoined a practical talent for business with a passionate interest in all questions touching human destiny. About six years Goethe's senior, he was, on Goethe's own testimony, far ahead of him in the domain of philosophical thought. After Herder, Jacobi was indeed the most stimulating personality Goethe had met. While his intercourse with Lavater and Basedow had been only a source of entertainment, from Jacobi he received a stimulus which opened up new depths of thought and feeling.

Both Goethe and Jacobi have left records of their intercourse, and both are equally enthusiastic regarding the profit they derived from it. From the first moment of their meeting there was a spontaneous interchange of their deepest thoughts and feelings, unique in the experience of both. In Jacobi's company Goethe became another man from what he had been in the company of Lavater and Basedow. "I was weary," he says, "of my previous follies and wantonness, which, in truth, only concealed my dissatisfaction that this journey had brought so little profit to my mind and heart. Now, therefore, my deepest feelings broke forth with irrepressible force." After a few days spent at Pempelfort, during which Georg Jacobi joined them, the two brothers accompanied Goethe to Cologne on his homeward journey. It was during the hours they were together at Cologne that the conversation of Fritz and Goethe became most intimate, and these hours remained a moving memory with both even when in after years divided aims and interests had estranged them. A visit to the cathedral of Cologne recalled Goethe's enthusiasm for the cathedral of Strassburg, but its unfinished condition depressed him with the sense of a great idea unrealised, for in his own words "an unfinished work is like one destroyed." The emotions evoked by another spectacle in Duesseldorf, according to Goethe's own testimony, had the instantaneous effect of his gaining for life the confidence of both Jacobis. The sight which equally moved all three was the unchanged interior of the mansion of a citizen of Cologne named Jabach, who a century before had been distinguished as an amateur of the fine arts. But what specially impressed them was a picture by Le Brun representing Jabach and his family in all the freshness of life, and the consequent reflection that this picture was the sole memorial that they had ever lived. "This reflection," Georg Jacobi comments, "made a profound impression on our stranger,"[184] and the impression must have been abiding, since in no passage of his Autobiography does he recall more vividly the emotions of a vanished time.

[Footnote 184: Biedermann, op. cit. i. 45.]

The evening of the day they spent in Cologne is noted both by Goethe and Fritz Jacobi as marking a point in their intellectual development. The inn in which they were quartered overlooked the Rhine, the murmur of whose moonlit waters was attuned to the sentiments that had been evoked in the course of the day. In the prospect of their near parting all three were disposed to confidential self-revelations, and the conversation ran on themes regarding which they had all thought and felt much—on poetry, religion, and philosophy. As usual with him when he was in congenial company, Goethe freely declaimed such pieces of verse as happened at the time to be interesting him—the verses on this occasion being Scottish ballads and two poems of his own, Der Koenig von Thule, and Der untreue Knabe. In philosophy the talk turned mainly on Spinoza, of whom Goethe spoke "unforgettably."[185] "What hours! what days," wrote Fritz immediately after their parting, "thou soughtest me about midnight in the darkness; it was as if a new soul were born within me. From that moment I could not let thee go."[186] Neither, in the ecstasy of these moments, dreamt that at a later day Spinoza, who was now their strongest bond of union, was to be the main cause of their estrangement. For Jacobi Spinoza became the "atheist," to be reprobated as one of the world's false prophets; while for Goethe he remained to the end the man to whom God had been nearest and to whom He had been most fully revealed.

[Footnote 185: As Goethe at this time knew little of Spinoza's philosophy, it was probably on Spinoza's personal character that he enlarged. On this theme, we have seen, he had discoursed with Lavater.]

[Footnote 186: Biedermann, op. cit. i. 45.]

Shortly after parting with Goethe, Fritz Jacobi communicated his impression of him to Wieland in the following words: "The more I think of it, the more intensely I realise the impossibility of conveying to one who has not seen or heard Goethe any intelligible notion of this extraordinary creation of God. As Heinse[187] expressed it, 'Goethe is a genius from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,' one possessed, I may add, for whom it is impossible to act from mere caprice. One has only to be with him for an hour to feel the utter absurdity of desiring him to think and act otherwise than he thinks and acts. By this I don't mean to suggest that he cannot grow in beauty and goodness, but that in his case such growth must be that of the unfolding flower, of the ripening seed, of the tree soaring aloft and crowning itself with foliage."[188]

[Footnote 187: Johann J.W. Heinse, a minor poet of the time, and one of Goethe's most fervent admirers.]

[Footnote 188: Biedermann, op. cit. i. 45-6.]

On leaving the Jacobis Goethe proceeded to Ems, where he again met Lavater and Basedow. On the day following Lavater went home, and Goethe and Basedow remained till the second week of August. On the 13th Goethe was in his father's house, and in a state of exaltation after his late experiences, to which he gives lively expression in a letter to Fritz Jacobi. "I dream of the moment, dear Fritz, I have your letter and hover around you. You have felt what a rapture it is to me to be the object of your love. Oh! the joy of believing that one receives more from others than one gives. Oh, Love, Love! The poverty of riches—what force works in me when I embrace in him all that is wanting in myself, and yet give to him what I have.... Believe me, we might henceforth be dumb to each other, and, meeting again after many a day, we should feel as if we had all along been walking hand in hand."[189]

[Footnote 189: Werke, Briefe, ii. 182.]

In the first weeks of October Goethe made personal acquaintance with a more distinguished personage than either Lavater or Basedow or Jacobi—"the patriarch of German poetry," Klopstock, the author of the Messias.[190] Since his childhood, the name of Klopstock had been familiar to Goethe. To his conservative father, the Messias, as written in unrhymed verse, was a monstrosity in German literature, and he refused to give it a place in his library. Surreptitiously introduced into the house, however, Goethe had read it with enthusiasm and committed its most striking passages to memory. And he had retained his admiration throughout all the successive changes in his own literary ideals. Like all the youth of his generation, he saw in Klopstock a great original genius to whom German poetry owed emancipation from conventional forms and new elements of thought, feeling, and imagination. Klopstock, on his part, had been interested in the rising genius whose Goetz von Berlichingen had taken the world by storm, and had signified through a common friend that he would be gratified to see other works from his hand. Goethe had responded in the spirit of a youthful adorer, conscious of the honour which the request implied. "And why should I not write to Klopstock," he wrote, "and send him anything of mine, anything in which he can take an interest? May I not address the living, to whose grave I would make a pilgrimage?"[191]

[Footnote 190: Klopstock came from Goettingen, where he was the idol of a band of youthful poets.]

[Footnote 191: Werke, Briefe, ii. 182.]

These communications took place in May, and in the beginning of October Goethe received an invitation from Klopstock to meet him at Friedberg. Owing to some delay on his journey, however, Klopstock did not appear at the time appointed, but, gratified by Goethe's eagerness to meet him, he shortly afterwards came to Frankfort and was for a few days a guest in the Goethe household. From Goethe's account of their intercourse we gather that their intercourse was not wholly satisfactory to either. Klopstock was in his fiftieth year, and his somewhat self-conscious and pedantic manner did not encourage effusion.[192] Like certain other poets he affected the tone of a man of the world and deliberately avoided topics relative to his own art. The two themes on which he expanded were riding and skating—of which latter pastime he had indeed made himself the laureate. Goethe himself was passionately fond of both exercises, but from "the patriarch of German poetry" he might have expected discourse on higher themes. Apparently, however, their relations remained sufficiently cordial, as, when Klopstock took his departure, Goethe accompanied him to Mannheim. On his way home in the post-carriage Goethe gave utterance to his feelings in some rhapsodical lines—An Schwager Kronos—(To Time the Postillion)—which may be regarded as a commentary on his impressions of the great man. Written in the unrhymed, irregular measure which Klopstock had been the first to employ, and containing phrases directly borrowed from Klopstock, they give passionate expression to his desire for a life, brief it might be, but a life alive to the end with the zest of living. It was the sentiment of the youth of the Sturm und Drang, which the chilling impression he had received from Klopstock doubtless evoked with rebounding force during his solitary drive home in the post-carriage.[193]

[Footnote 192: Merck found in Klopstock "viel Weltkunde und Weltkaelte."]

[Footnote 193: Writing to Sophie von la Roche on November 20th, Goethe calls Klopstock "a noble, great man, on whom the peace of God rests," Werke, Briefe ii. 206.]

In the same month of October Goethe had other visitors less distinguished, youths of his own age, who came to pay homage to him as their acknowledged leader in the literary revolution of which Goetz had been the manifesto. We have seen the impressions Goethe made upon his seniors like Lavater and Fritz Jacobi; how he struck his more youthful acquaintances is recorded by two of them—both poets of some promise who had attracted attention by their contempt of conventionalities. It will be seen that their language shows that Goethe's own exuberant style in his correspondence of the period was not peculiar to himself. The first to come was H.C. Boie, an ardent worshipper of Klopstock, and one of the heroes of the Sturm und Drang. "I have had a superlative, delightful day," Boie records, "a whole day spent alone and uninterrupted with Goethe—Goethe whose heart is as great and noble as his mind! The day passes my description." The other visitor, F.A. Werthes, who comprehensively worshipped both Klopstock and Wieland, leaves Boie behind in the exuberance of his impressions. "This Goethe," he wrote to Fritz Jacobi, "of whom from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof and from the going down thereof to its rising I should like to speak and stammer and rhapsodise with you ... this Goethe has, as it were, transcended all the ideals I had ever conceived of the direct feeling and observation of a great genius. Never could I have so well explained and sympathised with the feelings of the disciples on the way to Emmaus when they said: 'Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us by the way?' Let us make of him our Lord Christ for evermore, and let me be the least of His disciples. He has spoken so much and so excellently with me; words of eternal life which, so long as I live, shall be my articles of faith."[194] Apart from its relation to Goethe, it will be seen that Werthes' letter is a document of the time, bringing before us, as it does, the strained and distorted sentiment, sufficiently apparent in Goethe himself, but which he, almost alone of the youths of his generation, was strong enough to hold in check.

[Footnote 194: Biedermann, op. cit. i. 46.]

In the following month (December) Goethe received still another visit—a visit which was directly to lead to the most decisive event in his life. As he was sitting one evening in his own room, a stranger was ushered in, whom in the dusk he mistook for Fritz Jacobi. The stranger was Major von Knebel, who had served in the Prussian army, but was now on a tour with the young princes of Weimar, Carl August and Constantin, to the latter of whom he was acting as tutor. Knebel was keenly interested in literature, was a poet himself, and an ardent admirer of Goethe. There followed congenial talk which was to be the beginning of a friendship that, unlike most of Goethe's youthful friendships, was to endure into the old age of both. But Knebel had come on a special errand; the young princes had expressed the desire to become acquainted with the man who had made merry with their instructor Wieland, and whose name was in all men's mouths as the author of the recently published Werther. Nothing loth, Goethe accompanied Knebel to the princes, and in the interviews that followed he displayed all the tact that characterised his subsequent intercourse with the great. Studiously avoiding all reference to his own productions, he turned the conversation on subjects of public interest, on which he spoke with a fulness of knowledge that convinced his hearers that the author of Werther was not an effeminate sentimentalist. So favourable was the impression he made on the princes that they expressed a wish that he would follow them to Mainz and spend a few days with them there. The proposal was highly acceptable to Goethe, but there was a difficulty in the way. The Herr Rath was a sturdy republican, and had an ingrained aversion to the nobility as a class. In his opinion, for a commoner to seek intercourse with that class was to compromise his self-respect and to invite humiliation, and he roundly maintained that in seeking his son's acquaintance the princes were only laying a train to pay him back for his treatment of Wieland. When the Goethe household was divided on important questions, it was their custom to refer to the Fraeulein von Klettenberg as arbiter. That sainted lady was now on a sick-bed, but through the Frau Rath she conveyed her opinion that the invitation of the princes should be accepted. To Mainz, therefore, Goethe went in company with Knebel, who had remained behind to see more of him, and his second meeting with the two boys completed his conquest of them. Any resentment they may have entertained for his attack on Wieland was removed by his explanation of its origin, and it was with mutual attraction that both parties separated after a few days' cordial intercourse. Thus were established the relations which within a year were to result in Goethe's departure from "accursed Frankfort," and his permanent settlement at the Court of Weimar.

As it happens, we have a record of Knebel's impression of Goethe during their few days' intercourse, which as a characterisation comes next in interest to that of Kestner already quoted. "From Wieland," he writes, "you will have been able to learn that I have made the acquaintance of Goethe, and that I think somewhat enthusiastically of him. I cannot help myself, but I swear to you that all of you, all who have heads and hearts, would think of him as I do if you came to know him. He will always remain to me one of the most extraordinary apparitions of my life. Perhaps the novelty of the impression has struck me overmuch, but how can I help it if natural causes produce natural workings in me?... Goethe lives in a state of constant inward war and tumult, since on every subject he feels with the extreme of vehemence. It is a need of his spirit to make enemies with whom he can contend; moreover, it is not the most contemptible adversaries he will single out. He has spoken to me of all those whom he has attacked with special and genuinely felt esteem. But the fellow delights in battle; he has the spirit of an athlete. As he is probably the most singular being who ever existed, he began as follows one evening in Mainz in quite melancholy tones: 'I am now good friends again with everybody—with the Jacobis, with Wieland; and this is not as it should be with me. It is the condition of my being that, as I must have something which for the time being is for me the ideal of the excellent, so also I must have an ideal against which I can direct my wrath.'"[195]