Chapter XIV 1775. Last Months in Frankfort — The Urfaust
As he represents it in his Autobiography, this was the situation in which Goethe found himself on his return to Frankfort. All his personal friends warmly welcomed him back, though his father did not conceal his disappointment that he had not continued his travels into Italy. As for Lili, she had taken it for granted that the departure of her betrothed without a word of leave-taking could only imply his intention to break with her. Yet it was reported to him that in the face of all obstacles to their union she had declared herself ready to leave her past behind her and share his fortunes in America. Their intercourse was resumed, but they avoided seeing each other alone, as if conscious of some ground of mutual estrangement. “It was an accursed state, in some ways resembling Hades, the meeting-place of the sadly-happy dead.” In view of these relations between Lili and himself, he further adds, all their common friends were decidedly opposed to their union.
Such is the account which, in his retrospect, Goethe gives of his situation after his return to Frankfort, but his correspondence at the time shows that it cannot be accepted as strictly accurate. During the three remaining months he spent in Frankfort he on four different occasions visited Offenbach, where he must often have seen her alone. What his letters indeed prove is that he was characteristically content to let each day bring its own happiness or misery, and to leave events to decide the final issue. On August 1st, a few days after his return, he writes to Knebel: “I am here again... and find myself a good deal better, quite content with the past and full of hope for the future.”229 Two days later he was in Offenbach, and from Lili’s own room he writes as follows to the Countess: “Oh! that I could tell you all. Here in the room of the girl who is the cause of my misery—without her fault, with the soul of an angel, over whose cheerful days I cast a gloom, I.... In vain that for three months I have wandered under the open sky and drunk in a thousand new objects at every pore.”230 To Lavater on the following day he writes that he has been riding with Lili, and adds these words with an N.B.: “For some time I have been pious again; my desire is for the Lord, and I sing psalms to him, a vibration of which shall soon reach you. Adieu. I am in a sore state of strain; I might say over-strain. Yet I wish you were with me, for then it goes well in my surroundings.”231 A letter addressed to Merck later in the same month would seem to show that he had at least no intention of seeking an immediate union with Lili. By the end of the year at the latest, he says, he must be off to Italy, and he prays Merck to prevail with his father to grant his consent.
A crisis in the relations between the lovers came on the occasion of the Frankfort fair in the second week of September. The fair brought a crowd of males, young, middle-aged, and old, all on more or less intimate terms with the Schönemann family, and their familiarities with Lili were gall and wormwood to Goethe, though he testifies that, as occasion offered, she did not fail to show who lay nearest her heart. Even in his old age the experience of these days recalled unpleasant memories. “But let us turn,” he exclaims, “from this torture, almost intolerable even in the recollection, to the poems which brought some relief to my mind and heart.”232 A remarkable contemporary document from his hand proves that his memory did not exaggerate his state of mind at the time.233 In the form of a Diary, expressly meant for his Countess, he notes day by day the alternating feelings which were distracting him. The Countess had urged him once for all to break his bonds, and in these words we have his reply: “I saw Lili after dinner, saw her at the play. I had not a word to say to her, and said nothing! Would I were free! O Gustchen! and yet I tremble for the moment when she could become indifferent to me, and I become hopeless. But I abide true to myself, and let things go as they will.”234
In all this tumultuous effusion we see the side of Goethe’s nature which he has depicted in Werther, in Clavigo, and Fernando. Yet all the while he was completely master of his own genius. Throughout all his alternating raptures and despairs he was assiduously practising the arts to which his genius called him. He diligently contributed both text and drawings to Lavater’s Physiognomy; he worked at art on his own account, making a special study of Rembrandt; and, as we shall see, even at the time when his relations to Lili were at the breaking-point he was producing poetical work which he never surpassed at any period of his life. From two distinguished contemporaries, both men of mature age, who visited him during this time of his intensest preoccupation with Lili, we have interesting characterisations of him which complement the impressions we receive from his own self-portraiture. The one is from J.G. Sulzer, an author of repute on matters of art. “This young scholar,” Sulzer writes, “is a real original genius, untrammelled in his manner of thinking, equally in the sphere of politics and learning.... In intercourse I found him pleasant and amiable.... I am greatly mistaken if this young man in his ripe years will not turn out a man of integrity. At present he has not as yet regarded man and human life from many sides. But his insight is keen.”235 The other writer is J.G. Zimmermann, one of the remarkable men of his time, whose book on Solitude, published in 1755, had brought him a European reputation. “I have been staying in Frankfort with Monsieur Göthe,” he writes, “one of the most extraordinary and most powerful geniuses who has ever appeared in this world.... Ah! my friend, if you had seen him in his paternal home, if you had seen how this great man in the presence of his father and mother is the best conducted and most amiable of sons, you would have found it difficult not to regard him through the medium of love.”236
On October 12th, 1775, happened an event which was to be the decisive turning-point in Goethe’s life. On that day the young Duke of Weimar and his bride arrived in Frankfort on their way home from Carlsruhe, where they had just celebrated their marriage, and again both warmly urged him to visit them at Weimar.237 We have it on Goethe’s own word that he had decided on a second flight from Frankfort as the only escape from his unendurable situation, but the invitation of the ducal pair brought his decision to a point. He accepted the invitation, announced his resolve to all his friends, and made the necessary preparations for his journey. The arrangement was that a gentleman of the Duke’s suite, then at Carlsruhe, was to call for him on an appointed day and convey him to Weimar. The appointed day came, but no representative of the Duke appeared. To avoid the embarrassment of meeting friends of whom he had formally taken leave, he kept within doors, working off his impatience in the composition of a play which the world was afterwards to know as Egmont. More than another week passed, and, weary of his imprisonment, he stole out in the darkness enveloped in a long cloak to avoid recognition by chance friends. In his memory there lived one of these night-wanderings when he stood beneath Lili’s window, heard her sing the song, beginning Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich, in which, in the first freshness of his love, he had described the witchery with which she had bound him, and, the song ended, saw from her moving shadow that she paced up and down the room, evidently deep in thoughts which he leaves us to divine. Only his fixed resolve to renounce her, he adds in his narrative of the incident, prevented him from making his presence known to her.
There was one member of the Goethe household who was not displeased at the non-appearance of the ducal representative. The father had from the first been strenuously opposed to his son’s going to Weimar, and in his opinion the apparent breach of the appointment was only an illustration of what a commoner was to expect in his intercourse with the great. His own desire was that his son should proceed to Italy with the double object of breaking his connection with Lili, and of enlarging his experience by an acquaintance with that country and its treasures. The embarrassing predicament of his son offered the opportunity of realising his desire, and he now proposed to him that he should at once start for Italy and leave his cares behind him. In the circumstances there appeared to be no other alternative, and on October 30th Goethe left Frankfort with Italy as his intended goal. Heidelberg was to be his first stage, and on the way thither he began the Journal in which he meant to record the narrative of his travels. The two pages he wrote are the intense expression of the mental strain in which he set forth on a journey which was to have such a different issue from what he dreamt. The parting from Lili was uppermost in his thoughts. “Adieu, Lili,” he wrote, “adieu for the second time! The first time we parted I was full of hope that our lots should one day be united.238 Fate has decided that we must play our rôles apart.”
At Heidelberg he spent a few days in the house of a lady of whom we have already heard—that Mademoiselle Delf who had so effectually brought matters to a point between Goethe and Lili. She was now convinced that the betrothal had been a mistake, but, undismayed, she now suggested to him that there was a lady in Heidelberg who would be a satisfactory substitute for the lost one. One night he had retired to rest after listening to a protracted exposition of the Fräulein’s projects for his future, when he was roused by the sound of a postilion’s horn. The postilion brought a letter which cleared up the mystery of the delayed messenger. Hastily dressing, Goethe ordered a post-chaise, and, amid the vehement expostulations of his hostess, began the first stage of the journey which was to lead him not to Italy but to the Court of Weimar. It was the most momentous hour of his life, and, as he took his place in the carriage, he called aloud, in mock heroics, to the excited Fräulein words which he may have recently written in Egmont, and which had even more significance as bearing on his own future than he could have dreamed at the moment: “Child! Child! Forbear! As if goaded by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time bear onward the light car of our destiny; and nothing remains for us but, with calm self-possession, firmly to grasp the reins, and now right, now left, to steer the wheels here from the precipice and there from the rock. Whither he is hasting, who knows? Does anyone consider whence he came?”239
With him to Weimar Goethe bore two manuscripts to which, during his last years in Frankfort, he had, at one time and another, committed his deepest feelings as a man, his profoundest thoughts as a thinker, and his finest imaginations as a poet. The one contained the first draft of the drama which, as we have seen, was written in those days of torturing suspense preceding his final departure from his paternal home, and which, subsequently recast, was to take its place among the best known of his works—the tragedy of Egmont. Of far higher moment for the world, however, was the matter contained in the other of these manuscripts. Therein were set down the original portions of a poem which was eventually to fructify into one of the great imaginative products of all time—the drama of Faust.
Beyond all other of Goethe’s productions previous to his settling in Weimar, these original scenes of Faust bring before us his deepest and truest self. In all the other longer works of that period, in Götz, in Werther, in Clavigo, and the rest, one side—the emotional side—of his nature had been predominantly represented; but in what he wrote of Faust we have all his mind and heart as he had them from nature, and as they had been schooled by time. It is one of the fortunate incidents in literary history that we now possess these fragments in which the genius of Goethe expressed itself with an intensity of imaginative force which he never again exemplified in the same degree. The original text was unknown till 1887, when Erich Schmidt found it in the possession of a grandnephew of a lady of the Court of Weimar,240 who had copied it from the manuscript received by her from Goethe. It is uncertain whether the manuscript thus discovered exactly corresponds to the manuscript which Goethe took with him to Weimar, but the probability is that their contents are virtually identical.
As in the case of Der Ewige Jude, Prometheus, and other fragments of the Frankfort period, the successive scenes of the Urfaust were thrown off at different times on the inspiration of the moment, and the exact date of their production can only be a matter of conjecture. What we do know is that the figure of the legendary Faust had early attracted his attention. As a boy he had read at least one of the chap-books which recorded the wondrous history of the scholar who had sold himself to the devil, and, as a common spectacle in Germany, he must have seen the puppet-show in which the story of Faust was dramatised for the people. According to his own statement, it was in 1769 that the conception of a poem, based on the Faust legend, first suggested itself to him, but it was during the years 1774 and 1775 that most of the scenes of the Urfaust were written. Both by himself and others there are references during these years to his work on Faust, and as late as the middle of September, 1775, he tells the Countess Stolberg that, while at Offenbach with Lili, he had composed another scene.
What attracted Goethe to the legend of Faust was that it presented a framework into which he could dramatically work his own life’s experience, equally in the world of thought and feeling. The story that depicted a passionate searcher for truth, rebelling against the limits imposed by the place assigned to man in the nature of things, who at all costs dared to burst these limits in order to enjoy life in all its fulness—this story had a suggestiveness that appealed to Goethe’s profoundest consciousness. “I also,” he says in his Autobiography, “had wandered at large through all the fields of knowledge, and its futility had early enough been shown to me. In life also I had experimented in all manner of ways, and always returned more dissatisfied and distracted than ever.” Of this correspondence which Goethe recognised between the legendary Faust and his own being, the final proof is that on the basis of the legend he eventually constructed the work in which he embodied all that life had taught him of the conditions under which it has to be lived.
When Goethe first put his hand to the Urfaust, he had no definite conception of an artistic whole in which the suggestions of the legend should be focussed in view of a determinate end. As we have it, the Urfaust consists of twenty-two scenes—those that relate the Gretchen tragedy alone having any necessary connection with each other. All the successive parts, including the Gretchen tragedy, suggest improvisation under a compelling immediate impulse with no reference to what had gone before or what might come after. Apart from its poetic value, therefore, the Urfaust is the concentrated expression of what had most intensely engaged Goethe’s mind and heart previous to the period when it was produced.
In the Urfaust we have neither the Prologue in the Theatre nor the Prologue in Heaven, but, with the exception of some verbal changes, the opening scene which introduces us to Faust is identical with that of the poem in its final form. Seated at his desk in a dusty Gothic chamber, furnished with all the apparatus for scientific experiment, Faust reviews his past life, and finds that he has been mocked from the beginning. In every department of boasted knowledge he has made himself a master, but it has brought satisfaction neither to his intellect nor his heart, and he has turned to magic in the hope that it would reveal to him the secrets that would make life worth living. As in the completed Faust, he opens the book of Nostradamus and finds the signs of the Macrocosmus and of the Earth-Spirit, by both of which he is baffled in his attempt to enter the arcana of being.
In the Urfaust, also, we have, with a few verbal alterations, the Scene in which Faust communicates to his famulus Wagner his cynical view of the value of human knowledge. In the Urfaust, however, are lacking the Scenes that follow in the completed poem—Faust’s soliloquy and meditated suicide, the Easter walk, the appearance of Mephistopheles in the shape of a poodle, and the compact that follows. In place of these scenes we have but one, in which Mephistopheles, without previous introduction, is represented as a professor giving advice to a raw student who has come to consult him as to his future course of conduct and study. Of all the Scenes in the Urfaust this is the feeblest, and its immaturity, as well as its evident references to Goethe’s own experiences at Leipzig, suggest that it was the earliest written. This Scene is followed by another reminiscent of Leipzig—the Scene in Auerbach’s cellar, which mainly differs from the later form in being written in prose and not in verse—Faust and not Mephistopheles playing the conjuror in drawing wine from a table. In the completed poem we are next introduced to the Witches’ Kitchen, where Faust is rejuvenated, and where he sees Margaret’s image in a mirror—the reader being thus prepared for the tragedy that is to follow. In the Urfaust we pass with no connecting link from the Scene in Auerbach’s Cellar to Faust’s meeting with Margaret and the successive Scenes which depict her self-abandonment to Faust and her consequent misery and ruin. The content of these Scenes is virtually the same in both forms—the most important difference being that, while the concluding Prison Scene is in prose in the Urfaust, it is in verse in the later form. Of the three songs which Margaret sings, only the first, “There was a King in Thule,” was retouched. In the Urfaust the duel between Valentin and Mephistopheles does not occur, and we have only Valentin’s soliloquy on the ruin of his sister; and the scenes, Wald und Höhle, the Walpurgis Nacht, the Walpurgisnachtstraum, generally condemned by critics as inartistic irrelevancies, are likewise lacking.241
The Urfaust is the crowning poetic achievement of the youthful Goethe, and by general consent, as has already been said, he never again achieved a similar intense fusion of thought, feeling, and imagination. Apart from the opening Scenes, which have no dramatic connection with it, the Gretchen tragedy constitutes an artistic whole which by its perfection of detail and overwhelming tragic effect must ever remain one of the marvels of creative genius. Not less astonishing as a manifestation of Goethe’s youthful power is the creation in all their essential lineaments of the three figures, Faust, Mephistopheles, and Margaret—figures stamped ineffaceably on the imagination of educated humanity. Be it said also that from the Urfaust mainly come those single lines and passages which are among the memorable words recorded in universal literature. Such, to specify only a few, are the Song of the Earth-Spirit; the lines commenting on man’s vain endeavour to comprehend the past, and on the dreariness of all theory,242 contrasted with the freshness and colour of life; Faust’s confession of his religious faith, and Margaret’s songs. To have added in this measure to the intellectual inheritance of the race assures the testator his rank among the great spirits of all time.
With the Urfaust, marking as it does the highest development which Goethe attained in the years of his youth, this record of these years may fitly close. His characteristics as they present themselves during that period are certainly in strange contrast to the conception of the matured Goethe which holds general possession of the public mind, at least in this country. In that conception the world was for the later Goethe “a palace of art,” in which he moved—
“as God holding no form of creed
But contemplating all.”243
But such transformations of human character are not in the order of nature, and, due allowance made for the numbing hand of time, the youthful Goethe remained essentially the same Goethe to the end. Behind the mask of impassivity which chilled the casually curious who sought him in his last years there was ever that etwas weibliches which Schiller noted in him in his middle age. In the critical moments of life he was in his maturity as in his youth subject to emotions which for the time seemed to be beyond his control. On the death of his wife his behaviour was that of one distracted. He described himself at the age of fifteen as “something of a chameleon,” and, as already remarked, Felix Mendelssohn, who saw him a year before his death, declared that the world would one day come to believe that there had not been one but many Goethes. We have seen that throughout the period of his youth some external impulse to production was a necessity of his nature, and so it was to the close. What Behrisch and Merck and his sister Cornelia did for him in these early years, had to be done for him in later life by similar friends and counsellors. If, like Plato and Dante, he was “a great lover” in his youth, “a great lover” he remained even into time-stricken age; when past his seventieth year he was moved by a passion from which, as in youth, he found deliverance by giving vent to it in passionate verse. It is in the youthful Goethe, before time and circumstance had dulled the spontaneous play of feeling, that we see the man as he came from nature’s hand, with all his manifold gifts, and with all his sensuous impulses, tossing him from one object of desire to another, yet ever held in check by the passion that was deepest in him—the passion to know and to create.
Garden City Press Limited, Letchworth, Herts.
Footnotes
1 Gespräche mit Eckermann, January 27th, 1824.
2 In 1792, on the occasion of his being offered the honour of Rathsherr (town-councillor) in Frankfort, he wrote to his mother that “it was an honour, not only in the eyes of Europe, but of the whole world, to have been a citizen of Frankfort.” (Goethe to his mother, December 24th, 1792). So, in 1824, he told Bettina von Arnim that, had he had the choice of his birthplace, he would have chosen Frankfort. As we shall see, Goethe did not always speak so favourably of Frankfort.
3 Die Abgeschiednen betracht’ ich gern,
Stünd’ ihr Verdienst auch noch so fern;
Doch mit den edlen lebendigen Neuen
Mag ich wetteifernd mich lieber freuen.
4 In his later years Goethe preferred life in a small town. “Zwar ist es meiner Natur gemäss, an einem kleinen Orte zu leben.” (Goethe to Zelter, December 16th, 1804.)
5 To Chancellor von Müller Goethe said: “Mein Vater war ein tüchtiger Mann, aber freilich fehlte ihm Gewandtheit und Beweglichkeit des Geistes.”
6 Writing to her grandchild, Goethe’s mother says: “Dein lieber Vater hat mir nie Kummer oder Verdruss verursacht.”
7 When the son of Frau von Stein was about to visit her, Goethe wrote: “Da sie nicht so ernsthaft ist wie ich, so wirst du dich besser bei ihr befinden.”
8 Goethe’s letters addressed to Cornelia from Leipzig, when he was in his eighteenth year, are in the tone at once of an affectionate brother and of a schoolmaster. Their subsequent relations to each other will appear in the sequel.
9 It was doubtless due to the absence of strict drill in his youth that Goethe, as he himself tells us, never acquired the art of punctuating his own writings.
10 Goethe said of himself that he had no “grammatical vein.”
11 With reference to what he says of his Biblical studies he wrote as follows to a correspondent (January 30th, 1812): “Dass Sie meine asiatischen Weltanfänge so freundlich aufnehmen, ist mir von grossem Wert. Es schlingt sich die daher für mich gewonnene Kultur durch mein ganzes Leben....”
12 His remark to Eckermann (1828) is well known: “Meine Sachen können nicht populär werden; wer daran denkt und dafür strebt, ist in einem Irrthum.”
13 So Weislingen (in Götz von Berlichingen), whom Goethe meant to be a double of himself, says: “Ich bin ein Chamaeleon.”
14 All Goethe’s boyish productions that have been preserved will be found in Der junge Goethe, Neue Ausgabe in sechs Bänden besorgt von Max Morris, Leipzig, 1909.
15 X. Doudan, Mélanges et Lettres, i. 524.
16 Werke, Briefe, Band i., 68-9.
17 On the occasion of a visit he paid to Leipzig in 1783, Goethe says: “Die Leipziger sind als eine kleine, moralische Republik anzusehn. Jeder steht für sich, hat einige Freunde und geht in seinem Wesen fort.”
18 Gespräche mit Riemer, Anfang 1807.
19 Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.
20 In point of fact Goethe retained to the end the intonation and the idioms of his native speech.
21 In his Autobiography Goethe states as the reason for his casting off the home-made suit he had brought with him from Frankfort, that a person entering the Leipzig theatre in similar costume excited the ridicule of the audience.
22 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 159.
23 Ib. pp. 60-3.
24 Ib. pp. 61-2.
25 Ib. pp. 81-2.
26 Ib. p. 86. The passage is in French.
27 This was the work of Behrisch, who was a virtuoso in calligraphy.
28 Werke, Briefe, i. 96-7.
29 Ib. p. 105.
30 Ib. p. 116.
31 Ib. p. 133.
32 Ib. pp. 158-9.
33 “Das Bedürfnis meiner Natur zwingt mich zu einer vermannigfaltigten Thätigkeit,” he wrote of himself in his thirty-second year.
34 When, in his thirty-sixth year, Goethe renewed his acquaintance with Oeser, he wrote of him to Frau von Stein: “C’est comme si cet homme ne devroit pas mourir, tant ses talents paroissent toujours aller en s’augmentant.”
35 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 179.
36 In later years he consoled himself with the reflection that the time he had spent on the technicalities of art was not wholly lost, as he had thus acquired powers of observation which were valuable to him both as a poet and as a man of science.
37 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 67.
38 Ib. p. 88.
39 Notably in his paper, entitled Literarischer Sansculottismus. See above, p. 4. Regarding Lessing he made this remark to Eckermann (February 7th, 1827): “Bedauert doch den ausserordentlichen Menschen, dass er in einer so erbärmlichen Zeit leben musste, die ihm keine bessern Stoffe gab, als in seinen Stücken verarbeitet sind!”
40 “Lessing war der höchste Verstand, und nur ein ebenso grosser konnte von ihm wahrhaft lernen. Dem Halbvermögen war er gefährlich.” (To Eckermann, January 18th, 1825.)
41 Nine of these Lieder Goethe thought worthy of a permanent place in his collected works.
42 This play was based on an earlier attempt made in Frankfort.
43 The exact time and place of its composition is uncertain, but Goethe’s own testimony seems to indicate that it was mainly written in Leipzig, in 1769. It was first published in 1787, with some modifications, which affect only the form.
44 With a fatuity into which he occasionally fell, Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit remarks that his two plays are an illustration of that most Christian text, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”
45 The translation of this passage is by Miss Minna Steele Smith.—Poetry and Truth from My Own Life (London, 1908.)
46 In a letter to W. von Rumohr (September 28th, 1807), Goethe calls “unaufhaltsame Natur, unüberwindliche Neigung, drängende Leidenschaft” the “Haupterfordernisse der wahren Poesie.” In two of his Zahme Xenien Goethe has expressed his opinion on the necessity of inspiration in poetic production:—
Ja das ist das rechte Gleis,
Dass man nicht weiss,
Was man denkt,
Wenn man denkt:
Alles ist als wie geschenkt.
All unser redlichstes Bemühn
Glückt nur im unbewussten Momente.
Wie möchte denn die Rose blühn,
Wenn sie der Sonne Herrlichkeit erkennte!
47 When approaching his eightieth year, Goethe remarked to Chancellor von Müller (March 6th, 1828): “Wer mit mir umgehen will, muss zuweilen auch meine Grobianslaune zugeben, ertragen, wie eines andern Schwachheit oder Steckenpferd.”
48 Referring to the time he now spent in Frankfort, Goethe says in Dichtung und Wahrheit: “Mit dem Vater selbst konnte sich kein angenehmes Verhältniss knüpfen.”
49 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 215.
50 Ib. p. 217.
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.
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.”
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 passage may be taken as a commentary on the whole period of his life with which we are dealing: “Stiller Rückblick auf’s Leben auf die Verworrenheit Betriebsamkeit, Wissbegierde der Jugend, wie sie überall herumschweift, um etwas Befriedigendes zu finden. Wie ich besonders in Geheimnissen, dunklen imaginativen Verhältissen eine Wollust gefunden habe.”
54 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 179, November 7th, 1768.
55 Ib. p. 173.
56 Ib. p. 217.
57 Ib. p. 211.
58 Ib. p. 224.
59 Goethe saw Käthchen 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.”
60 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 205.
61 Ib. p. 230.
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.”
63 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 200.
64 So we are led to infer from what he says in Part iii., Book ii. of Dichtung und Wahrheit.
65 Werke, Briefe, Band i. 232.
66 Ib. p. 234.
67 Ib. pp. 240, 241.
68 Lerse, one of Goethe’s friends in Strassburg, said: “Da geriet Goethe oft in hohe Verzückung, sprach Worte der Prophezeiung und machte Lerse Besorgnisse, er werde überschnappen.” (Goethe’s Gespräche. Gesamtausgabe von Freiherrn v. Biedermann, Leipzig, 1909, i. p. 19.)
69 Werke, Briefe, Band i. pp. 245-7.
70 Jung Stilling.
71 Biedermann, op. cit., i. pp. 15, 19. At an earlier period Goethe was thus described: “Er mag 15 oder 16 Jahr alt sein, im übrigen hat er mehr ein gutes Plappermaul als Gründlichkeit.” Ib. p. 6.
72 Goethe’s personal appearance made such a remarkable impression on all who met him that it deserves to be more minutely described. In stature he was slightly over the middle height, though the poise of his head, both in youth and age, gave the impression of greater tallness. Till past his thirtieth year he was notably slender in figure, a defect in symmetry being the observable shortness of the legs, and he walked with swift, elastic step. The foot was elegantly shaped, but the hand was that of the descendant of ancestors who had been engaged in manual labour. The head was of oval form, the chin small and feminine, the height of the forehead remarkable. The face, which (in youth) gave the impression of smallness, was brown in complexion; the nose was delicately formed and slightly curved; the hair brown, abundant, and usually dishevelled. The feature which struck all who met him for the first time was the eyes, which were brown in colour, large, and widely-opened, with the white conspicuous, and piercingly bright.—An exhaustive study of the portraits and busts of Goethe will be found in Goethes Kopf und Gestalt von Karl Bauer, Berlin, 1908.
73 Stilling elsewhere says: “Schade, dass so wenige diesen vortrefflichen Menschen seinem Herzen nach kennen!” Others used similar expressions regarding Goethe’s mind and heart.
74 R. Haym, Herder’s biographer, says of him: “Einen unbedingt erfreulichen, harmonischen Eindruck kann dieser Mann, der selbst von den ’gräulichen Dissonanzen’ redet, in die Äussererungen zuweilen ausklingen möchten, auch auf den günstigst gestimmten Betrachter nimmermehr machen.” (Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken, Berlin, 1887, i. p. 396.)
75 Goethe attached so much importance to many of Hamann’s utterances that, as late as 1806, he had thoughts of bringing out an edition of Hamann’s works.
76 Herder thought that Goethe was lacking in enthusiasm.
77 Elsewhere Herder calls Goethe a Specht, a wood-pecker.
78 Writing to a correspondent in 1780, Goethe says: “Herder fährt fort, sich und andern das Leben sauer zu machen.”
79 Götz von Berlichingen.
80 Von deutcher Baukunst.
81 Werke, Briefe, Band i. p. 264. He adds that he would prefer to be Mercury, the least of the seven planets that revolve round the sun, than first among the five that revolve round Saturn.
82 Herder himself says of his influence on Goethe: “Ich glaube ihm, ohne Lobrednerei, einige gute Eindrücke gegeben zu haben, die einmal wirksam werden können.”—Haym, op. cit. i. 392.
83 Ib. Band ii. p. 18.
84 Schiller, in a letter to C.G. Körner, the father of the poet, writes (July, 1787): “He [Herder] said that Goethe had greatly influenced his intellectual development.”
85 Ib. Band i. p. 250.
86 Subsequent investigation has proved that Goethe has committed several errors of fact in his narrative. For example, he relates that on his first visit to the Sesenheim family he was vividly reminded of the family of the Vicar of Wakefield. In point of fact, he was introduced to Goldsmith’s work by Herder, who came to Strassburg subsequent to Goethe’s first visit to Sesenheim.
87 Ib. p. 251.
88 It is recorded that his voice trembled as he dictated the passages referring to Sesenheim and Friederike.
89 In reality, there were four daughters, but Goethe omits mention of the other two in order to make more striking the resemblance between the family of the Vicar of Wakefield and that of Sesenheim.
90 Biedermann, op. cit. i. pp. 16-17.
91 In the recently discovered manuscript of Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung occurs this passage, evidently self-descriptive: “Als Knabe hatte er zu grossen prächtigen Worten und Sprüchen eine ausserordentliche Liebe, er schmückte seine Seele damit aus wie mit einem köstlichen Kleide, und freute sich darüber, als wenn sie zu ihm selbst gehörten kindlisch über diesen äussern Schmuck.”
92 Werke, Briefe, Band i. p. 258 ff.
93 Friederike died in 1815. She was still alive when Goethe was writing the story of their love.
94 Nichts taugt Ungeduld,
Noch weniger Reue;
Jene vermehrt die Schuld,
Diese schafft neue.
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.”
96 In point of fact, only two legal cases passed through Goethe’s hands during the first seven months after his return. During the later period of his stay in Frankfort he was more busily engaged with law.
97 The younger brother, Georg, subsequently married Cornelia.
98 Werke, Briefe, Band 2, pp. 7-8.
99 Ib. p. 6.
100 Ib. p. 8.
101 Ib. p. 14.
102 So it was then thought, but the exact date is uncertain.
103 The toast of the evening—“The Will of all Wills”—was given by Goethe, who thereupon delivered the panegyric on Shakespeare which he had composed in Strassburg. This toast was followed by one to the health of Herder.
104 In the characters of Marie and Elizabeth we have traits of Friederike and of Goethe’s mother.
105 As we have seen, the Leipzig book of verses did not attract general attention.
106 Lessing strongly disapproved of Götz as flouting the doctrines laid down in his Dramaturgie. When his brother announced to him that Götz had been played with great applause in Berlin, his cold comment was that no doubt the chief credit was due to the decorator.
107 Two of the scenes in Götz were imitated by Scott in his own work—the Vehmgericht scene in Anne of Geierstein and the description of the siege of Torquilstone by Rebecca to the wounded Ivanhoe. Scott also borrowed from Egmont.
108 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, November 9th, 1824.
109 It was Schlosser who had made Goethe and Merck acquainted. Herder, to whom Merck was known, had been a previous intermediary.
110 A six hours’ walk.
111 The poem, entitled Der Wanderer, noted below.
112 The girl meant was no doubt Käthchen Schönkopf.
113 Über Goethe’s Gedichte (1911), p. 157.
114 On account of his constant travels between Frankfort and Darmstadt, Goethe was known among his friends as the Wanderer. The poem was written in the autumn, during Goethe’s residence in Wetzlar.
115 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 19-20.
116 Werther, as Goethe reminds us in one of his Venetian epigrams, was known in China:—
Doch was fördert es mich, dass auch sogar der Chinese
Malet mit ängstlicher Hand Werthern und Lotten auf Glas?
117 The Praktikanten were voluntary attendants on the Imperial Court, had little or no dependence on the authorities, and lived on their own resources.
118 Caroline Flachsland to Herder, May 25th, 1772.
119 Goethe to Herder, Werke, Briefe, Band ii. 15.
120 In the Kronprinz, the principal hotel in the town.
121 Goethe’s own lodging (still shown) was in the Gewandsgasse, a narrow, dirty street, whence sun or moon could be seen at no season of the year.
122 In his contemporary letters, Goethe does not always speak of Gotter so favourably as he does in his Autobiography.
123 An exhaustive account of Goethe’s sojourn in Wetzlar will be found in W. Herbst’s Goethe in Wetzlar, 1772. Vier Monate aus des Dichters Jugendleben, Gotha, 1881.
124 This is the expression of Kestner, Lotte’s betrothed.
125 Such abrupt departures were characteristic of Goethe. We shall find him taking similar unceremonious leave of another of his loves. Goethe, wrote Frau von Stein to her son (May, 1812), “kann das Abschied nehmen nicht leiden, er ging ohne Abschied neulich von mir.”
126 Kestner’s characterisation of Goethe will be found in Biedermann, op. cit. i. pp. 21-3.
127 Goethe had made Jerusalem’s acquaintance in Leipzig. Jerusalem called Goethe a Geck, a coxcomb, a description which, as we have seen, was not inapplicable to him in his Leipzig days. Jerusalem was a friend of Lessing, who highly esteemed him, and after his death published his MSS.
128 In point of fact, Goethe announced himself. Merck arrived after him.
129 In a letter to Schiller (July 24th, 1799) Goethe gives a much less favourable estimate of Frau von la Roche, whom he had just met: “Sie gehört zu den nivellierenden Naturen, sie hebt das Gemeine herauf und zieht das Vorzügliche herunter....”
130 Goethe to Kestner, November 10th, 1772. Werke, Briefe, Band ii. 35.
131 To the same, September 15th, 1773. Ib. p. 104.
132 Ib. pp. 82-3.
133 November 27th, 1772.
134 Goethe wrote the epilogue to the last number of the Review, of which he says to Kestner, “hat ich das Publikum und den Verleger turlipinirt.”
135 In its new form Götz was no better adapted for the stage. “Eine angeborne Unart ist schwierig zu meistern,” is Goethe’s own remark on his attempt to make it a good acting play.
136 Ich bin wie immer der nachdenkliche Leichtsinn und die warme Kälte.—Goethe to Sophie von la Roche, September 1st, 1780.
137 A quarrel had arisen between Merck and Leuchsenring, and Goethe had warmly taken Merck’s side.
138 As we have seen, Herder was jealous of Goethe’s own attentions to Caroline.
139 It was published in the autumn of the following year, 1774.
140 W. Scherer was the first to identify Herder with Satyros.
141 Satyros was not published till 1814, after Herder’s death, but he was aware of its existence.
142 Max Morris, op. cit. iv. 81.
143 The following passage from an article in the Hibbert Journal, by M. Bergson (October, 1911, pp. 42-3), is an interesting commentary on Goethe’s conception: “If, then, in every province the triumph of life is expressed by creation, might we not think that the ultimate reason of human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men alike; I mean the creation of self by self, the continual enrichment of personality, by elements which it does not draw from outside, but causes to spring forth from itself?”
144 Viktor Hehn pointed out that the drama and the ode are inspired by different motives, and that it was in forgetfulness that Goethe associated them.—Über Goethe’s Gedichte, p. 160. Bielschowsky (Goethe, Sein Leben und Seine Werke, i. 510) suggests that the ode may have been intended as the opening of Act ii.
145 Sir Frederick Pollock dates “modern Spinozism” from this incident.—Spinoza: His Life and Opinions (London, 1880), p. 390.
146 While writing a defence of his friend Lessing against the charge of atheism, Mendelssohn’s mental agitation was such that it was believed to have occasioned his death.
147 Turgenieff relates that on translating passages from Satyros and Prometheus to Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Daudet, all three were profoundly impressed by the range and power displayed in them.
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.
149 It is this conception, as he himself tells us, that Renan applied to the life and teaching of Jesus.
150 In his sixty-second year Goethe also said of himself: “Denn gewöhnlich, was ich ausspreche, das tue ich nicht, und was ich verspreche, das halte ich nicht.”
151 Werke, Briefe, ii. 140.
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.”
153 In making these modifications Goethe was advised by Herder and Wieland.
154 Though to the satisfaction of neither Kestner nor Lotte.
155 It was shortly after his meeting with Lotte Buff that Goethe learned that she was engaged to Kestner.
156 Goethe gave the blue eyes of Maxe to Charlotte. Lotte Buff’s eyes were brown.
157 “Werther,” Goethe remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson, “praised Homer while he retained his senses, and Ossian when he was going mad.”
158 Werke, Briefe, ii. 156.
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.
160 By Sainte-Beuve.
161 Werke, Briefe, ii. 207.
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 erläuternden Documenten (Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1854).
163 Eckermann, op. cit., January 2nd, 1824.
164 The accidie of the Middle Ages was a form of Wertherism. Cf. Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale.
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, and ch. xix. of The Wrecker.
166 Fragment de mon voyage d’Espagne.—Mémoires de Monsieur Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, tome ii.
167 Of all the women who came in her son’s way, Frau Goethe thought that this lady, Anna Sibylla Münch by name, would have made him the most suitable partner in life.
168 To Fritz Jacobi, August 21st, 1774.
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 Götz.
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.
171 Saying of Philine in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, bk. iv. ch. ix.
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.
173 By Felix Mendelssohn.
174 See above, p. 65.
175 It was first published in 1836, four years after his death.
176 In one of his Xenien Goethe speaks thus of Lavater:—
“Schade, dass die Natur nur einen Menschen aus dir schuf,
Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.”
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.
178 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 33.
179 Ib. p. 34.
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.
181 Basedow remained for a time at Mülheim. As we shall see, he and Goethe met again later in the month.
182 As Werther was not published till the autumn of 1774, there must be some confusion in Lavater’s narrative.
183 Werke, Briefe, ii. 180.
184 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 45.
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.
186 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 45.
187 Johann J.W. Heinse, a minor poet of the time, and one of Goethe’s most fervent admirers.
188 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 45-6.
189 Werke, Briefe, ii. 182.
190 Klopstock came from Göttingen, where he was the idol of a band of youthful poets.
191 Werke, Briefe, ii. 182.
192 Merck found in Klopstock “viel Weltkunde und Weltkälte.”
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.
194 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 46.
195 Max Morris, op. cit. iv. 370-1. About the same date as Knebel’s letter, Goethe wrote to Sophie von la Roche: “Das ist was Verfluchtes dass ich anfange mich mit niemand mehr misszuverstehen.” In his 49th year Goethe said of himself: “Opposition ist mir immer nötig.”
196 Ib. p. 370.
197 In a letter written to Johanna Fahlmer from Weimar (April 10th, 1776) Goethe vehemently expresses his dislike of the Schönemann kin. “I have long hated them,” he says; “from the bottom of my heart.... I pity the poor creature [Lili] that she was born into such a race.”
198 Eckermann, March 5th, 1830. What has been said of Chateaubriand, who made use of a similar expression, may probably be said with greater truth of Goethe, “Il ment à ses propres souvenirs et à son coeur.” In a letter to Frau von Stein (May 24th, 1776) Goethe describes his relation to Friederike Brion as “das reinste, schönste, wahrste, das ich ausser meiner Schwester je zu einem Weibe gehabt.”
199 She is described as a pretty blonde, with blue eyes and fair hair. In a letter (March 30th, 1801) addressed to Lili, then a widow, Goethe writes: “Sie haben in den vergangenen Jahren viel ausgestanden und dabei, wie ich weiss, einen entschlossenen Mut bewiesen, der Ihnen Ehre macht.”
200 It may be regarded as significant that Goethe makes no reference to the Countess in his Autobiography.
201 Werke, Briefe, ii. 230.
202 Ib. pp. 233-4.
203 Ib. p. 113.
204 He says of the piece that it cost him “little expenditure of mind and feeling.” Ib.
205 Goethe was not known to be the author. In a letter to Johanna Fahlmer, he expresses his curiosity to know if Lili was present at its performance. Erwin und Elmire, it should be said, contains two of Goethe’s most beautiful songs, the one beginning “Ein Veilchen auf der Wiese stand,” and the other “Ihr verblühet, süsse Rosen.”
206 In deference to the general opinion that this ending was immoral, Goethe, in a later form of the play, makes Fernando shoot himself.
207 Stella and other German plays are wittily parodied in The Rovers; or, The Double Arrangement.
208 Goethe gives Fernando his own brown eyes and black hair.
209 After he had broken with her, and was settled in Weimar.
210 During his residence in Rome in 1787. He recast Erwin und Elmire at the same time.
211 To this period probably belongs Lilis Park, the most playfully humorous of Goethe’s poems, in which he banters Lili on her capricious treatment of himself (represented as a bear) as one of her menagerie—the motley crowd of her suitors.
212 Certain pranks played by Goethe during his stay in Offenbach show that he was not wholly given up to “lover’s melancholy.” On a moonlight night, robed in a white sheet, and mounted on stilts (a form of exercise to which he was addicted), he went through the town and created a panic among the inhabitants by looking into their windows. On another occasion, at a baptism, he secretly deposited the baby in a dish, and covering it with a towel, placed the dish on a table where the company were assembled. It was only after some time that the contents of the dish were revealed.
213 Werke, Briefe, ii. 246.
214 Werke, Briefe, ii. 249.
215 Ib. p. 255.
216 Frau Schönemann is recorded to have said that the different religion of the two families was the cause of the match being broken off.
217 Werke, Briefe, ii. 261-2.
218 The third was Count Haugnitz, of more subdued temper than his companions.
219 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 55.
220 According to Goethe, Count Haugnitz was the only one of the four who showed any sense of propriety.
221 It was at this time that Merck gave his famous definition of Goethe’s genius. See above, p. 135.
222 The Urfaust.
223 Goethe was known as the “Bear” or the “Huron” among his friends.
224 Werke, Briefe, ii. 266.
225 Cornelia died in June, 1777, when Goethe was settled in Weimar.
226 On Cornelia’s death he wrote to his mother: “Mit meiner Schwester ist mir so eine starcke Wurzel die mich an der Erde hielt abgehauen worden, dass die Aeste von oben, die davon Nahrung haben, auch absterben müssen.”
227 Biedermann, op. cit. i. 59. Goethe made Lavater the victim of one of the practical jokes which he was in the habit of playing on his friends. Seeing an unfinished sermon of Lavater on his desk, he completed it during the absence of Lavater, who, in ignorance of the addition, preached the whole sermon as his own.—Ib. p. 58.
228 According to a tradition in the Passavant family, it was Goethe, not Passavant, who was so eager to descend into Italy.—Biedermann, op. cit. i. 58.
229 Werke, Briefe, ii. 272.
230 Ib. p. 273.
231 Ib. pp. 277-8.
232 The two poems, Lilis Park and the song beginning “Ihr verblühet, süsse Rosen,” which Goethe refers to this period, were really written at an earlier date. The latter, we have seen, appears in Erwin und Elmire.
233 It was at this time that he translated the Song of Solomon, which he calls “the most glorious collection of love-songs God ever made.”
234 Werke, Briefe, ii. 294. In a letter to the Countess’s brothers about the same date, Goethe writes: “Gustchen [the Countess] is an angel. The devil that she is an Imperial Countess.”—Ib. p. 298.
235 Biedermann, op. cit. i. p. 60.
236 Max Morris, op. cit. v. 470.
237 The Duke had previously passed through Frankfort on his way to Carlsruhe. On that occasion, also, Goethe had been in intercourse with him.
238 This, as we have seen, is not consistent with certain of his former statements.—In June of 1776 Lili was betrothed to another, but, owing to his bankruptcy, marriage did not follow. In 1778, however, she was married to a Strassburg banker. Like all Goethe’s loves, she retained a kindly memory of him. She is reported to have said that she regarded herself as owing her best self to him.—Max Morris, op. cit. v. 468.
239 Miss Swanwick’s translation. Goethe concludes his Autobiography with these words.
240 Fräulein Luise von Göchhausen.
241 The words “[Sie] ist gerettet” are not in the Urfaust.
242 Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
243 Tennyson disclaimed having Goethe in his mind when he wrote The Palace of Art.