The Youth of Goethe Part 3

On August 28th, 1768, Goethe left Leipzig after a residence of nearly three years. He had gone to Leipzig in the spirit of a prisoner released from his gaol; he left it in the spirit of one returning to durance. In his Autobiography he has described the depressing conditions under which he re-entered his father's house. In body and mind he had found that in "accursed Leipzig one burns out as quickly as a bad torch." In body he was a broken man. One night in the beginning of August he had been seized with a violent hemorrhage, and for some weeks his life hung by a thread. In his Autobiography he a.s.signs various reasons for his illness. As the result of an accident on his journey from Frankfort to Leipzig he had strained the ligaments of his chest, and the mischief was aggravated by a subsequent fall from his horse; he had suffered from the fumes of the acids he had inhaled in the process of etching; he had ruined his digestion by drinking coffee and heavy beer; and, in accordance with the precepts of Rousseau, he had adopted a _regime_ which proved too severe for his enfeebled const.i.tution. So he wrote in his old age, but his contemporary letters leave us in little doubt regarding the cause of his breakdown. He had, in fact, during the latter part of his sojourn in Leipzig lived the life of the average German student of his day. He had fought a duel, and had been wounded in the arm; he had drunk more than was good for him, and we have seen that he had followed other courses not conducive to his bodily health.

His mental condition was equally unsatisfactory. There was not a friend, he tells us, whom at one time or another he had not annoyed by his caprice, or offended by his "morbid spirit of contradiction" and sullen avoidance of intercourse. All through his life Goethe seems to have tried his friends by his variable humours,[47] but it was seldom that he completely alienated them, and he gratefully records how in his present stricken condition they rallied to his side, and put him to shame by their a.s.siduous attentions. One of these friends, Langer by name, who had succeeded Behrisch as tutor to the young Count, he specially mentions as helping to give a new turn to his thoughts.

Langer was religiously disposed, and found in Goethe, now in a mood to receive them, a sympathetic listener to his theological views. Under Langer's influence he resumed his youthful study of the Bible--not in the Old Testament, however, but in the New, which he read, he tells us, with "emotion and enthusiasm." It was the beginning of a new phase in his life which was to last for about a year and a half, a phase in which religion, if we are to accept the testimony of his Autobiography, held the uppermost place in his thoughts.

[Footnote 47: When approaching his eightieth year, Goethe remarked to Chancellor von Muller (March 6th, 1828): "Wer mit mir umgehen will, muss zuweilen auch meine Grobianslaune zugeben, ertragen, wie eines andern Schwachheit oder Steckenpferd."]

It was with the feelings of "a s.h.i.+pwrecked seaman," he tells us, that he found himself again under his father's roof, though he characteristically adds that "he had nothing specially to reproach himself with." The atmosphere he found at home was not such as to put him in better spirits. Father, mother and daughter had been living in mutual misunderstanding during the whole period of the son's absence in Leipzig. Cornelia had been made the sole victim of her father's pedagogic discipline which had been partially alleviated when it was shared with her brother, and she had come to regard her over-anxious parent with a hardness which Goethe describes as having something dreadful (_furchterliches_) in it. The arrival of Goethe could not improve the existing relations in the household. As in the time before his going to Leipzig, Cornelia drew to him as the only member of the family who sympathetically understood her, and she remained as obdurate as ever in her sullen att.i.tude towards her father. Between Goethe himself and his father their former estrangement continued, and we are given to understand that during the year and a half he now spent under the paternal roof there was no cordial understanding regarding the son's pursuits and his future career.[48] Dissatisfied with his son, as from his point of view he had every reason to be, Herr Goethe nevertheless cherished a secret pride in his genius. With a paternal pride, which is even touching in the circ.u.mstances, he carefully framed the drawings executed by his son, and collected and st.i.tched together his letters from Leipzig.

[Footnote 48: Referring to the time he now spent in Frankfort, Goethe says in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_: "Mit dem Vater selbst konnte sich kein angenehmes Verhaltniss knupfen."]

As in the case of his Leipzig period, Goethe's reminiscent account of his present sojourn in Frankfort gives a somewhat different impression of his main interests from that conveyed by his contemporary letters.

If we accept the testimony of his Autobiography, his attention was mainly turned to religion and to chemical and cabbalistical studies; from his correspondence, on the other hand, it would appear that his thoughts at least occasionally ran on subjects that had little to do with his spiritual welfare. At the same time, the apparent discrepancy need not imply self-contradiction. The correspondents to whom his letters were addressed were not persons specially interested in religion or chemistry or the cabbala, and, of all men, Goethe was least likely to be obsessed by any set of ideas to the exclusion of all others. There can be little doubt, indeed, that during his year and a half in Frankfort religion was a more predominant interest in his life than at any other period; and the fact is sufficiently explained by the circ.u.mstances in which he then found himself. From the condition both of his mind and body he was disposed to self-searching. Regret for the past was foreign to his nature; in his mature judgment, indeed, such a feeling was resolutely to be checked in the interest of healthy self-development. Yet in the retrospect of his Leipzig days it seems to have crossed his mind that he might have spent them more wisely. "O that I could recall the last two years and a half,"[49] he wrote to Kathchen Schonkopf, and he warns a male correspondent in Leipzig to "beware of dissoluteness."[50] And the state of his health during the greater part of this time in Frankfort was such as to strengthen this mood. Immediately after his return from Leipzig he was threatened with pulmonary disease, and the state of his digestion became such as to alarm himself and his friends. On December 7th he was attacked by a violent internal pain, and for some days there were the gravest fears for his life. After two months'

confinement to his room there was a partial recovery, but it was not till the spring of 1770 that his health was completely restored.

[Footnote 49: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 215.]

[Footnote 50: _Ib._ p. 217.]

But the truth is that Goethe's temporary preoccupation with religion is only another ill.u.s.tration of his "chameleon" temperament. In gay Leipzig he had promptly taken on the ways of a man about town; now in Frankfort he found himself in a very different society, and he as promptly entered into the spirit of it. The circle of which he now became a member was a company of religious persons, mostly women, friends or acquaintances of his mother. Its most prominent member was that Fraulein von Klettenberg, already mentioned, a woman of high rank, culture, and refinement. To moral beauty of character in man or woman, Goethe, at all periods of his life, was peculiarly sensitive,[51] and in the Fraulein he saw a woman who combined at once the most winning graces of her s.e.x and the virtues of a saint. For women of all ages and all types Goethe had always a singular attraction, and, though the Fraulein must have discerned that he could never be a son or brother in the spirit, she was profoundly interested in the wayward youth in whom she saw a brand that deserved to be plucked from the burning.

[Footnote 51: _Cf._ his beautiful characterisation of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, in whom he found the embodiment at once of the Christian graces and of _reine Menschlichkeit_.]

With a kind of half consent Goethe entered into the spirit of the pious circle; he even attended communion in spite of his unhappy memories of that sacrament, and was present at a Synod of the Herrnhut Community to which Fraulein von Klettenberg belonged. Bound up with the Fraulein's religion was a curious interest in the occult powers of nature from the point of view of their relation to the human body. It is with evident irony that Goethe relates how in his own case the efficacy of these occult powers was tried. Among the members of the religious community was a mysterious physician who was credited with possessing certain medicines of peculiar virtue. He was believed to have in store one drug--a powerful salt--which he reserved only for the most dangerous cases, and regarding which, though they had never seen the result of its operation, the community spoke with bated breath. At the vehement request of his mother the mysterious medicine was administered to Goethe at the crisis of his malady, at the hour of midnight, and with all due solemnity. From that moment his illness took a favourable turn, and he steadily progressed towards recovery.

"I need not say," is his comment, "how greatly this result strengthened and heightened our faith in our physician and our efforts to share such a treasure." Partly, therefore, out of his own insatiable curiosity and partly out of sympathy with his new friends, Goethe now betook himself to occult studies, and, in imitation of the Fraulein von Klettenberg, had a room fitted up with the necessary chemical apparatus. It was the first practical commencement of those scientific studies which were subsequently to occupy such a large part of his life. Along with his chemical experiments went the study of such visionaries in science as Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and others, but also of the great Boerhaave, whose _Inst.i.tutes of Medicine and Aphorisms_, containing all that was then known of medical theory, he "gladly stamped on his mind and memory."

To what extent are we to infer that Goethe really shared the religious views of the circle of pious persons with whom he was now living in daily contact? His own account we can only regard as half jesting, half serious. He would never have spiritual peace, Fraulein von Klettenberg told him till he had a "reconciled G.o.d." Goethe's rejoinder was that it should be put the other way. Considering his recent sufferings and his own good intentions, it was G.o.d who was in arrears to him and who had something to be forgiven. The Fraulein charitably condoned the blasphemy, but she and her fellow-believers were a.s.suredly in the right when they denied the blasphemer the name of _Christian_. Yet, as has been said, Goethe in his own way was seriously in search of a faith that would satisfy both his intellect and his heart, and he even attempted to construct one. A book that fell into his hands, Gottfried Arnold's _Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics_,[52] prompted the attempt. From this book, he tells us, he received a favourable impression of heretics, and the impression was comforting to one who, like himself, was looked on as a heretic by all his friends. Moreover, he had often heard it said that in the long run every man must have his own religion; why, therefore, should he not essay to think out a creed that would at least satisfy himself? In brief outline he has described the system which he evolved from his miscellaneous historical and scientific studies. It is, as he himself says, a strange composite of Neo-Platonism, and of hermetical, mystical, and cabbalistical speculations, all leading by a necessary logic to the dogmas of Redemption and the Incarnation--a conclusion which at least points to the fact that for Goethe at this time Christianity was a religion specifically predestined for man's salvation. "We all become mystics in old age," is a remark of his own at that period of life; and the conclusion of the Second Part of Faust, as well as other indications, proves that the remark was at least true of himself. But, as has often been pointed out, not only in old age, but at every period of his life, there was a mystic strain in him which was only kept in check by what was the strongest instinct of his nature--the instinct that demanded the direct vision of the concrete fact as the only condition on which he could build "the pyramid of his life."

[Footnote 52: Probably Goethe had this book in his mind when he wrote the sarcastic epigram:--

"Es ist die ganze Kirchengeschichte Mischmasch von Irrthum und von Gewalt."]

Goethe's experience derived from his intercourse with Fraulein von Klettenberg and her friends undoubtedly enriched his own nature and enlarged his conceptions of the content of human life, of its possible motives and ideals. It was not a circle into which his own affinities would have led him, but being in it, he, as was his invariable habit, drew from it to the full all that it could give for his own building-up. And in enriching his own nature and widening his outlook, the experience enlarged the scope of his creative productiveness. But for his intercourse with these pious enthusiasts the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul would not have found a place in _Wilhelm Meister_, and from the general picture of human life and its activities which it is the object of that book to present, there would have been lacking one conception of life and its responsibilities, not the least interesting in the history of the human spirit. Most specific and important of all his gains from his a.s.sociation with the Frankfort community, however, was that from it directly emerged what is universally regarded as his greatest creative effort--the First Part of Faust. The conception of that work was closely a.s.sociated with the chemical experiments and cabbalistic studies suggested by his intercourse with Fraulein von Klettenberg and her circle, and not only suggested but carried out on the foundation that had thus been laid.[53]

[Footnote 53: Yet at a later date he would seem to have regarded his mystical studies as among the errors of his youth. In his _Tagebuch_, under date August 7th, 1779, he writes as follows, and the pa.s.sage may be taken as a commentary on the whole period of his life with which we are dealing: "Stiller Ruckblick auf's Leben auf die Verworrenheit Betriebsamkeit, Wissbegierde der Jugend, wie sie uberall herumschweift, um etwas Befriedigendes zu finden. Wie ich besonders in [Transcriber's Note: corrected error "im"] Geheimnissen, dunklen imaginativen Verhaltissen eine Woll.u.s.t gefunden habe."]

As has been said, Goethe's contemporary letters addressed from Frankfort to his friends bring a different side of his life before us from that presented in the Autobiography. From these letters we gather that he was by no means wholly engrossed in religious or mystical studies. "During this winter," he wrote to his friend Oeser, about two months after his arrival in Frankfort, "the company of the muses and correspondence with friends will bring pleasure into a sickly, solitary life, which for a youth of twenty years would otherwise be something of a martyrdom."[54] In spite of the affectionate solicitude of Fraulein von Klettenberg and other friends, he found Frankfort a depressing place after gay Leipzig. "I could go mad when I think of Leipzig," wrote his sprightly friend Horn, who had also tasted the pleasures of that place; and Goethe shared his opinion. Both also agreed that the girls of Frankfort were vastly inferior creatures to those of Leipzig. "I came here," Goethe wrote in a poetical epistle to the daughter of Oeser, "and found the girls a little--one does not quite like to speak it out--as they always were; enough, none has as yet touched my heart."[55] It would appear, nevertheless, that he did find certain Frankfort girls to his taste. "I get along tolerably here," he wrote to another correspondent. "I am contented and quiet; I have half-a-dozen angels of girls whom I often see, though I have lost my heart to none of them. They are pleasant creatures, and make my life uncommonly agreeable. He who has seen no Leipzig might be very well off here."[56] His life in Frankfort was, in short, what he himself called it, an exile (_Verbannung_).

[Footnote 54: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 179, November 7th, 1768.]

[Footnote 55: _Ib._ p. 173.]

[Footnote 56: _Ib._ p. 217.]

Among his correspondents was Kathchen Schonkopf with whom, as we have seen, he had come to what he thought a satisfactory arrangement before leaving Leipzig. In this correspondence it is the Leipzig student, not the a.s.sociate of the Fraulein von Klettenberg, who is before us. There is the same waywardness, there are the same irresponsible sallies which made him such a difficult lover. If we are to take him seriously, he still suffered from the pangs of rejected love and regretted that his former relations to Kathchen had not continued. "A lover to whom his love will not listen," he writes, "is by many degrees not so unfortunate as one who has been cast off; the former still retains hope and has at least no fear of being hated; the other, yes, the other, who has once experienced what it is to be cast out of a heart which once was his, gladly avoids thinking, not to say speaking, of it."[57] When this pa.s.sage was written (June, 1769) he had received the news that Kathchen was betrothed to another. In a final letter addressed to her (January 23rd, 1770) occur these characteristic words: "You are still the same loveable girl, and you will also be a loveable wife. And I, I shall remain Goethe. You know what that means. When I mention my name, I mention all; and you know that, as long as I have known you, I have lived only as part of you."[58] So closed a relation of which it is difficult to say how much there was in it of genuine pa.s.sion, how much of artificial sentiment. Serious intention in it there was none; from the first Goethe perfectly realised the fact that he could never make Kathchen his wife.[59]

[Footnote 57: _Ib._ p. 211.]

[Footnote 58: _Ib._ p. 224.]

[Footnote 59: Goethe saw Kathchen as a married woman in Leipzig in 1776, when he wrote to the lady who then held his affections (Frau von Stein): "Mais ce n'est plus Julie."]

As at Leipzig, his other distractions did not divert him from his interests in art and literature. When the state of his health permitted, he a.s.siduously practised drawing and etching. "Now as formerly," he wrote to Oeser, "art is almost my chief occupation." But he also found time for wide excursions into the fields of general literature. Before leaving Leipzig he had exchanged with Langer "whole baskets-full" of German poets and critics for Greek authors, and these (though his knowledge of Greek remained to the end elementary) he must have read in a fas.h.i.+on. Latin authors he read were Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, and Pliny. Among the moderns Shakespeare and Moliere already held the place in his estimation which they always retained. Shakespeare he as yet knew only from the selections in Dodd's _Beauties_ and Wieland's translation, but he already felt his greatness, and, as we have seen, names him with Wieland and Oeser as one of his masters. "Voltaire," he wrote to Oeser, "has been able to do no harm to Shakespeare; no lesser spirit will prevail over a greater one."[60] The German writers who now stood highest in his esteem were Lessing and Wieland. Lessing's aesthetic teaching he accepted with some reserves, but this did not abate the admiration which he retained for him at every period of his life. "Lessing!

Lessing!" he wrote in the same letter to Oeser; "if he were not Lessing, I might say something. Write against him I may not; he is a conqueror.... He is a mental phenomenon, and, truly, such apparitions are rare in Germany."[61] That Goethe, at this period, should have had such an unbounded admiration for Wieland is an interesting commentary on his pietistic leanings; for Wieland was now in his full pagan phase, so distasteful to moral Germany, as Goethe himself indicates.

"I have already been annoyed on Wieland's account," he writes--"I think with justice. Wieland has often the misfortune to be misunderstood; frequently, perhaps, the fault is his own, but as frequently it is not." At a later day Goethe clearly saw and marked in Wieland that lack of "high seriousness" on which he himself came to lay such stress as all-important in literature and life, but in the meantime he freely acknowledged what Wieland had been to him.[62]

"After him (Oeser) and Shakespeare," he wrote in the letter just quoted, "Wieland is still the only one whom I can hold as my true master; others had shown me where I had gone astray; they showed me how to do better."

[Footnote 60: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 205.]

[Footnote 61: _Ib._ p. 230.]

[Footnote 62: Goethe has this entry in his _Tagebuch_ (April 2nd, 1780): "Wieland sieht ganz unglaublich alles, was man machen will, macht, und was hangt und langt in einer Schrift."]

What is noteworthy in the serious pa.s.sages of Goethe's Frankfort letters is the advance in maturity and self-knowledge which they reveal when compared with those written from Leipzig. Penetrative remarks on men and things, such as give its value to his later correspondence, now begin to fall from his pen by the way. He consciously takes the measure of his own powers, and forms clear judgments on the literary and artistic tastes of the time. The poems which he had written in Leipzig now seemed to him "trifling, cold, dry, and superficial," and, as in Leipzig he had made a holocaust of his boyish poems, so he made a second holocaust of those produced in Leipzig. In a long letter addressed (February 13th, 1769) to Friederike Oeser he thus expounds the artistic ideals at which he had then arrived: "A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher, and he who has laboriously thumbed the pages of many books regards with contempt the simple, easy book of nature; and yet nothing is true except what is simple--certainly a sorry recommendation for true wisdom. Let him who goes the way of simplicity go it in quiet. Modesty and circ.u.mspection are the essential characteristics of him who would tread this path, and every step will bring its reward. I have to thank your dear father for these conceptions; he it was who prepared my mind to receive them; time will give its blessing to my diligence which may complete the work he began."[63] In point of fact, partly owing to the depressing conditions in which he found himself, and partly, it may be, out of his own deliberate purpose, Goethe produced no work of importance during the year and a half he spent in Frankfort. It was a period of incubation, and the stimulus to production was to come to him in another environment.

[Footnote 63: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 200.]

In the spring of 1770 Goethe recovered his normal health and spirits, and, in accordance with his father's wish, he proceeded to Stra.s.sburg to complete his legal studies. He left home with as intense a feeling of relief as he had left it on the previous occasion. Between him and his father there had been growing estrangement, and the estrangement had ended in an open quarrel when he ventured to criticise the architecture of the paternal house, which had been constructed under his father's own directions. Thwarted though the father had been in his hopes of his son, however, he was not turned from his purpose of affording him every opportunity of laying a broad foundation of general culture. It was his express wish that Wolfgang, after completing his studies in Stra.s.sburg, should travel in France and spend some time in Paris.

CHAPTER IV

GOETHE IN STRa.s.sBURG

APRIL, 1770--AUGUST, 1771

Goethe was in his twenty-first year when he entered Stra.s.sburg in the beginning of April, 1770. From his maturer age and the chastening experience of the preceding eighteen months, therefore, it was to be expected that his management of his life in his new home would be more in accordance with his father's wishes than his wild ways in Leipzig.

In sending his son to Stra.s.sburg it was the father's intention that he should complete those legal studies of which he had made a jest in Leipzig, and qualify himself for the profession by which he was to make his future living. During his residence of some sixteen months in Stra.s.sburg Goethe did actually fulfil his father's wish, and returned to Frankfort as a full-fledged Licenciate of Laws, but as little as at Leipzig did the interests which engrossed him suggest future eminence in his profession.

What again strikes us is the rapidity with which he caught the tone of his new surroundings. In Stra.s.sburg he found a society whose ways of living and thinking were equally different from those of Frankfort and of Leipzig. Stra.s.sburg had not the bounded intellectual horizon which made him feel himself an alien in his native town, nor, on the other hand, did it offer the opportunities for frivolous distraction which he found in the "little Paris." Stra.s.sburg had been a French town for a hundred years, but there was no town in Germany more intensely German in its sympathies and aspirations. The officials and the upper cla.s.ses in the town spoke French and were French in their tastes and habits, but the great majority of its citizens clung to their national traditions with the tenacity of the conquered. It is Goethe's own testimony that his residence in Stra.s.sburg precisely at this period of his life was a decisive circ.u.mstance for his future development. At the moment of his arrival, he had not yet completely broken with French models, and he would even appear to have had vague dreams that he would eventually choose the French language as his literary medium.[64] Ever responsive to the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere in which he found himself, however, the intensely German sympathies of his Stra.s.sburg circle definitely turned him from a career which would have cut off his genius from its profoundest sources.

[Footnote 64: So we are led to infer from what he says in Part iii., Book ii. of _Dichtung und Wahrheit_.]

His decisive rejection of French for German ideals was the governing fact of his sojourn in Stra.s.sburg, but he had other experiences there which show that he was the same variable being of the Leipzig days.

His first letters from his new home would seem to show that he had brought with him something of the pious sentiments he had acquired from his a.s.sociation with Fraulein von Klettenberg, though his expression of them has a singular savour. About a fortnight after his arrival in Stra.s.sburg he writes as follows to one Limprecht, a theological student whose acquaintance he had made in Leipzig: "I am now again _Studiosus_, and, thank G.o.d, have now as much health as I need, and spirits in superabundance. As I was, so am I still; only that I stand better with our Lord G.o.d and with his dear Son Jesus Christ. It follows that I am a somewhat wiser man; and have learned by experience the meaning of the saying, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' To be sure, we first sing Hosanna to him who cometh yonder; well and good! even that is joy and happiness; the King must first enter before he ascends his throne." A week later he writes again to the same correspondent in a similar strain[65]: "I am a different man, very different: for that I thank my Saviour; and I am thankful also that I am not what I pa.s.s for."[66]

[Footnote 65: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 232.]

[Footnote 66: _Ib._ p. 234.]

Two months later (July 28th) he appears to be in the same pious frame of mind. "I still live somewhat at random," he writes to another correspondent, "and I thank G.o.d for it; and often, when I dare, I thank His Son also that I am in circ.u.mstances which seem to enjoin this random mode of life.... Reflections are very light wares, but prayer is a profitable business; a single welling-up of the heart to Him whom we call _a_ G.o.d till we can name Him _our_ G.o.d, and we are overwhelmed by the mult.i.tude of our mercies."[67]

[Footnote 67: _Ib._ pp. 240, 241.]

This mood, we cannot help feeling, sits ill on Goethe; pious as are his expressions, they have not the ring of the genuine believer. Yet it would be unjust to charge him with deliberate hypocrisy. The truth is that at this time, and indeed throughout all his sojourn in Stra.s.sburg, he was in a state of nervous irritability of which both himself and his friends were aware.[68] Other expressions in letters of the same date reveal a variability of moods, the only explanation of which is that he had not fully recovered from the depressed mental condition consequent on his long illness in Frankfort. But his unnatural mood of piety did not long withstand the new influences to which he was now subjected, and it is in a letter to Fraulein von Klettenberg herself, written towards the end of August, that he intimates his growing distaste for the religious set to whom she had introduced him in Stra.s.sburg. After telling her that he had been to Holy Communion "to remind him of the sufferings and death of our Lord," he proceeds: "My intercourse with the religious people here is not quite hearty, though at first I did turn very heartily to them; but it seems as if it were not to be. They are so deadly dull when they begin that my natural vivacity cannot endure it." He goes on to say that he has made the acquaintance of one who is of a different way of thinking from these people--one "who from the coolness of blood with which he has always regarded the world thinks he has discovered that we are put in this world for the special purpose of being useful in it; that we are capable of making ourselves so; that religion is of some help in this; and that the most useful man is the best."[69]