The Youth of Goethe Part 5

[Footnote 94:

Nichts taugt Ungeduld, Noch weniger Reue; Jene vermehrt die Schuld, Diese schafft neue.]

The distractions of Stra.s.sburg, no more than the distractions of Leipzig, diverted Goethe from what were his ruling instincts from the beginning--to know life and to be master of himself. As in Leipzig, his professional studies in Stra.s.sburg held little place in his thoughts; his law degree, he tells us, he regarded as a matter of "secondary importance." The subject he chose as his thesis--the obligation of magistrates to impose a State religion binding on all their subjects--was of a nature that had no living interest for him at any period of his life, and he wrote the thesis "only to satisfy his father." If his law studies were neglected, however, it was almost with feverish pa.s.sion that he coursed through other fields of knowledge. In the _Ephemerides_--a diary he kept in Stra.s.sburg and in which he noted his random thoughts and the books that happened to be engaging him--we can see the range of his reading and the scope of his interests. Occultism, metaphysics, science in many departments, literature ancient and modern, all in turn absorbed his attention and suggest a mental state impatient of the limits of the human faculties--the state of mind which he was afterwards so marvellously to reproduce in his _Faust_.[95] Inspired by the conversation of the medical students who met at the common table, as well as by his own natural bent, he attended the university lectures on chemistry and anatomy, and thus laid a solid foundation for his subsequent original investigations in these sciences. Extensive travels in the surrounding country were among the chief pleasures of his sojourn in Stra.s.sburg, and these travels, as was the case with him always, were voyages of discovery. Architecture, machinery, works of engineering, Roman antiquities, the native ballads of the district--on all he turned an equally curious eye, and with such vivid impressions that they remained in his memory after the lapse of half a lifetime.

[Footnote 95: "I, too," Goethe wrote in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, "had trodden the path of knowledge, and had early been led to see the vanity of it."]

In Goethe the instinct for self-mastery was as remarkable as his instinct for knowledge. As the result of his illness in Frankfort, his organs of sense were in a state of morbid susceptibility which "put him out of harmony with himself, with objects around him, and even with the elements." It throws a curious light on the nature of the man that amid all the preoccupations of his mind and heart in Stra.s.sburg he could deliberately turn his thoughts to the cure of his jarred nerves. Loud sounds disturbed him, and to deaden the sensitiveness of his ears he attended the evening tatoo; to cure himself of a tendency to giddiness he practised climbing the cathedral; partly to rid himself of a repugnance to repulsive sights he attended clinical lectures; and by a similar course of discipline he so completely delivered himself from "night fears" that he afterwards found it difficult to realise them even in imagination.

In his old age Goethe said of himself: "I have that in me which, if I allowed it to go unchecked, would ruin both myself and those about me." Was it, as Goethe would have us believe, by sheer purposive will that he kept this dangerous element in him under check and saved himself at critical moments from disaster? When we regard his life as a whole, the actual facts hardly justify such a conclusion. Nature had given him two safeguards which, without any effort of will on his own part, a.s.sured him deliverance where the risk of wreckage was greatest--a consuming desire to _know_ which grew with every year of his life, and a versatility of temperament which necessitated ever-renewed sensations equally of the mind and heart. Of the working of these two elements in him we have already had ill.u.s.tration; they will receive further ill.u.s.tration as we proceed.

It would be within the truth to say that the period of Goethe's sojourn in Stra.s.sburg was the most memorable epoch of his life. During the eighteen months he spent there he received an intellectual stimulus from which we may date his dedication to the unique career before him, in which self-culture, the pa.s.sion for knowledge, and the impulse to produce were all commensurate ends. Moreover, as has already been said, it was in Stra.s.sburg that his genius found its first adequate expression. And, what is worth noting in the case of one who was to range over so many fields, it was in lyric poetry that his genius first expressed itself. The problem with Goethe is to discover which among his various gifts was nature's special dowry to him. What, at least, is true is that at different periods of his life he produced numbers of lyrics which the world has recognised as among the most perfect things of their kind. And among these perfect things are the few songs and other pieces inspired by Friederike Brion.

Doubtless his genius would have flowered had he never seen Friederike, but it was among the many kind offices that fortune did him that he found the theme for his muse in one whose simple charm, while it excited his pa.s.sion, at the same time chastened and purified it, and compelled a truthful simplicity of expression in keeping with her own nature. It was to Friederike that Goethe owed the pure inspiration which gives his verses to her a quality rare in lyric poetry, but to the writing of them there went all the forces that were then working in him. In these verses we have the conclusive proof that he now both understood and felt poetry "in another sense" from that in which he had hitherto understood and felt it. Through them we feel the breath of another air than that which he had breathed when he strained his invention to make poetic compliments to Kathchen Schonkopf. In the intensity and directness of pa.s.sion which they express we may trace all the new poetic influences which he had come under in Stra.s.sburg--Shakespeare, Ossian, the popular ballad, the inspiration of Herder. What is remarkable in these early lyrics, however, is that though they vibrate with the emotion of the poet, the emotion is under strict restraint and never pa.s.ses into the watery effusiveness which is the inherent sin of so much German lyrical poetry. That "brevity and precision" which was the ideal he now put before him he had attained at one bound, and in none of his later work did he exemplify it in greater perfection. As his countrymen have frequently pointed out, these firstfruits of Goethe's genius mark a new departure in lyrical poetry. In them we have the direct simplicity of the best lyrics of the past, but combined with this simplicity a depth of introspection and a fusion of nature with human feeling which is a new content in the imaginative presentation of human experience. In connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside it such a poem as the following, we are reminded of the saying of Emerson that "the soul's advances are not made by gradation ... but rather by ascension of state."

WILKOMMEN UND ABSCHIED.

Es schlug mein Herz; geschwind zu Pferde, Und fort, wild, wie ein Held zur Schlacht!

Der Abend wiegte schon die Erde, Und an den Bergen hing die Nacht; Schon stund im Nebelkleid die Eiche, Wie ein geturmter Riese da, Wo Finsternis aus dem Gestrauche Mit hundert schwarzen Augen sah.

Der Mond von einem Wolkenhugel Sah klaglich aus dem Duft hervor; Die Winde schw.a.n.gen leise Flugel, Umsausten schauerlich mein Ohr; Die Nacht schuf tausend Ungeheuer; Doch frisch und frohlich war mein Mut; In meinen Adern welches Feuer!

In meinem Herzen welche Glut!

Dich sah ich, und die milde Freude Floss aus dem sussen Blick auf mich, Ganz war mein Herz an deiner Seite, Und jeder Athemzug fur dich.

Ein rosenfarbnes Fruhlingswetter Umgab das liebliche Gesicht, Und Zartlichkeit fur mich, ihr Gotter!

Ich hofft' es, ich verdient' es nicht.

Doch ach, schon mit der Morgensonne Verengt der Abschied mir das Herz: In deinen Kussen, welche Wonne, In deinem Auge, welcher Schmerz!

Ich ging, du standst und sahst zur Erden, Und sahst mir nach mit na.s.sem Blick; Und doch, welch Gluck geliebt zu werden!

Und lieben, Gotter, welch ein Gluck!

WELCOME AND PARTING.

Throbbed high my breast! To horse, to horse!

Raptured as hero for the fight; Soft lay the earth in eve's embrace, And on the mountain brooded night.

The oak, a dim-discovered shape, Did, like a towering giant, rise-- There whence from forth the thicket glared Black darkness with its myriad eyes.

From out a pile of cloud the moon Peered sadly through the misty veil; Softly the breezes waved their wings; Sighed in my ears with plaintive wail.

Night shaped a thousand monstrous forms; Yet fresh and frolicsome my breast; And what a fire burned in my veins, And what a glow my heart possessed!

I saw thee: in thine eye's soft gaze A tender, calm delight I knew; All motions of my heart were thine.

And thine was every breath I drew.

The freshest, richest hues of Spring Enhaloed thy lovely face,-- And tenderest thoughts for me!--my hope!

But, undeserved, ye Powers of Grace!

But, ah! too soon, with morning's dawn, The hour of parting cramps my heart; Then, in thy kisses, O what bliss!

And in thine eye, what poignant smart!

I went; thou stood'st and downward gazed, Gazed after me with tearful eyes; Yet, to be loved, what blessedness, And, oh! to love, ye G.o.ds, what bliss!

CHAPTER V

FRANKFORT--_GoTZ VON BERLICHINGEN_

AUGUST, 1771--DECEMBER, 1771

Goethe returned to Frankfort at the end of August, 1771, and, with the exception of two memorable intervals, he remained there till November, 1775, when he left it, never again to make it his permanent home. This period of four years and two months is in creative productiveness unparalleled in his own career, and is probably without a parallel in literary history. During these years he produced _Gotz von Berlichingen_ and _Werther_, both of which works, whatever their merits or demerits, are at least landmarks, not only in the history of German, but of European literature. To the same period belong the original scenes of _Faust_, in which he displayed a richness of imagination with a spontaneity of pa.s.sion, of thought and of feeling, to which he never attained in the subsequent additions he made to the poem. In these scenes are already clearly defined the two figures, Faust and Mephistopheles, which have their place in the world's gallery of imaginative creations beside Ulysses and Don Quixote, Hamlet and Falstaff; and there, too, in all her essential lineaments, we have Gretchen, the most moving of all the births of a poet's mind and heart. And, besides these three works of universal interest, there belong to the same period a series of productions--plays, lyrics, essays--which, though at a lower level of inspiration, were sufficient to mark their author as an original genius with a compa.s.s of thought and imagination hitherto unexampled in the literature of his country.

Had Goethe died at the age of twenty-six, he would have left behind him a legacy which would have a.s.sured him a place with the great creative minds of all time.

This extraordinary productiveness of itself implies an intellectual and spiritual ferment which receives further ill.u.s.tration from the poet's letters written during the same period. In these letters we have the expression of a mind distracted by contending emotions and conflicting aims, now in sanguine hope, now paralysed with a sense of impotence to adjust itself to the inexorable conditions under which life had to be lived. Moods of thinking and feeling follow each other with a rapidity of contrast which are bewildering to the reader and hardly permit him to draw any certain inference as to the real import of what is written. In one effusion we have lachrymose sentiment which suggests morbid self-relaxation; in another, a bitter cynicism equally suggestive of ill-regulated emotions. We have moods of piety and moods in which the mental att.i.tude towards all human aspirations can only be described as Mephistophelian.

Goethe himself was well aware of a congenital morbid strain in him which all through his life demanded careful control if he were to avert bodily and mental collapse. And at no period of his life did external conditions and inward experiences combine to put his self-control to a severer test than during these last years in Frankfort. Frankfort itself, as we shall see, had become more distasteful to him than ever, and his abiding feeling towards it, now as subsequently, was that he could not breathe freely in its atmosphere. On his return from Stra.s.sburg his father received him with greater cordiality than on his return from Leipzig, but the lack of real sympathy between them remained, and was undoubtedly one of the permanent sources of Goethe's discontent with his native town. With no interest in his nominal profession, he had at the same time no clear conception of the function to which his genius called him. Throughout these years in Frankfort he continued uncertain whether Nature meant him for a poet or an artist, and we receive the impression that his ambition was to be artist rather than poet. From the varied literary forms in which he expressed himself, also, we are led to infer that in the domain of literature he was still only feeling his way.

If the diversity of his gifts thus distracted him, his emotional experiences, it will appear, were not more favourable to a settled aim and purpose. One paroxysm of pa.s.sion succeeded another, with the result that he was eventually, in self-preservation, driven to make a complete breach with his past, and to seek deliverance in a new set of conditions under which he might attain the self-control after which he had hitherto vainly striven. This prolonged conflict with himself was doubtless primarily due to his own inherited temperament, but it was also in large measure owing to the character of the society and of the time in which the period of his youth was pa.s.sed. Had he been born half a century earlier--that is to say, in a time when the current speculation was bound up with a mechanical philosophy, and when the limits of emotion were conditioned by strict conventional standards--he might have been a youth of eccentric humours, but the morbid fancies and wandering affections that consumed him could not have come within his experience. But by the time when he began to think and feel, Rousseau had written and opened the flood-gates of the emotions, and Sterne had shown how accepted conventions might appear in the light of a capricious wit and fancy which probed the surface of things. In Goethe's letters, which are the most direct revelation of his mental and moral condition during the period, the influence of Rousseau and Sterne is visible on every page, and the fact has to be remembered in drawing any conclusions as to the real state of his mind from his language to his various correspondents. The fas.h.i.+on of giving exaggerated expression to every emotion was, in fact, the convention of the day, and we find it in all the correspondence, both of the men and women of the time. That it was in large degree forced and artificial and must be interpreted with due reserves, will appear in the case of Goethe himself.

There are three critical epochs during these Frankfort years, each marked by a central event which resulted in new developments of Goethe's character and genius. In the period between his return to Frankfort in August, 1771, and May, 1772, was written the first draft of _Gotz von Berlichingen_, the eventual publication of which made him the most famous author in Germany. During these months the memories of Stra.s.sburg are fresh in his mind, and the recollection of Friederike and the teaching of Herder are his chief sources of inspiration. In May, 1772, he went to Wetzlar, where, during a residence of three months, he pa.s.sed through another emotional experience which, two years later, found expression in _Werther_, of still more resounding notoriety than _Gotz_. The opening of 1775 saw him entangled in a new affair of the heart of another nature than those which had preceded it, and resulting in a mental turmoil that drove him to seek deliverance in a new field of life and action. There were other incidents and other experiences that moved him less or more during this period of his career, but it is in connection with these three central events that his character and his genius are presented in their fullest light, and are best known to the world.

We have it on Goethe's own testimony that, on his return from Stra.s.sburg to Frankfort, he was healthier in body and more composed in mind than on his return from Leipzig two years before. Still, he adds, he was conscious of a sense of tension in his nature which implied that his mind had not completely recovered its normal balance. So he writes in his Autobiography, and his contemporary letters fully bear out his memories of the period. He certainly returned from Stra.s.sburg with a more satisfactory record than from Leipzig. He had actually completed the necessary legal studies, and was now Licentiate of Laws.

His _Disputation_ had won the approval of his father, who was even prepared to go to the expense of publis.h.i.+ng it. In his son's purely literary efforts during his Stra.s.sburg sojourn, also, he showed an undisguised pleasure, and he would evidently have been quite content to have seen him combine eminence in his profession with distinction in literature. When Goethe, therefore, immediately on his arrival in the paternal home, took the necessary steps to qualify himself for legal practice, it seemed that the father's ambition for his wayward son was at length about to be realised.[96] But the apparent reconciliation of their respective aims was based on no cordial understanding, and the son, it is evident, made no special effort to adapt himself to his father's idiosyncrasies. An incident he himself relates curiously ill.u.s.trates his careless disregard of the conventions of the family home. On his way from Stra.s.sburg he picked up a boy-harper who had interested him, and seriously thought of making him a member of the household. The reconciling mother realised the absurdity of lodging in the mansion of an Imperial Rath a strolling musician, who would have to earn his living by daily visits to the taverns of the town, and she met her son's good-humoured whim by finding a home for the boy in more fitting quarters. These n.o.ble Bohemian humours of his son, which, as we shall see, displayed themselves in other unconventional habits, were not likely to propitiate a father who, as we are told, "leading a contented life amid his ancient hobbies and pursuits, was comfortably at ease, like one who has carried out his plans in spite of all hindrances and delays." In point of fact, as during Goethe's former sojourn at home, his estrangement from his father increased from year to year, and he came to speak of him with a bitterness which proves that, for a time at least, any kindly feeling that existed between them was effaced.

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

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

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

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

Amen."[98]

[Footnote 98: _Werke, Briefe_, Band 2, pp. 7-8.]

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

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

[Footnote 99: _Ib._ p. 6.]

[Footnote 100: _Ib._ p. 8.]

[Footnote 101: _Ib._ p. 14.]

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

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

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